Poet and activist Marcelo Hernandez Castillo was born in Zacatecas, Mexico, and moved with his family to the United States at age five. He grew up in the California Central Valley. He earned his BA from Sacramento State University and his MFA from the University of Michigan, where he was the first undocumented student to graduate from the Helen Zell Writers Program.
Castillo is the author of Children of the Land: A Memoir (HarperCollins, 2020); Cenzontle (BOA Editions, 2018), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr., Poetry Prize, the Northern California Book Award, and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award; and Dulce (Northwestern University Press, 2018), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. He is also co-editor of the anthology Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora (Harper Perennial). He has translated works by Jacobo Fijman, Yaxkin Melchy, and Marcelo Uribe.
Castillo is a founding member of the Undocupoets, which eliminated citizenship requirements from all major first poetry book prizes in the US. For this work, he was recognized with the Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers.
A distinguished fellow for the Marshall Project’s Art for Justice initiative from the University of Arizona, Castillo was an inaugural recipient of the Writing Freedom Fellowship from Haymarket Books and the Mellon Foundation. His work has been longlisted for the California Book Award, the Foreword Indies Prize, and the Lambda Literary Award, among other honors. He has received fellowships from CantoMundo, the Squaw Valley Writer’s Workshop, and the Vermont Studio Center. He is the 2025 guest editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review and has also curated the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day Series.
Castillo teaches at St. Mary’s College of California and in the Ashland University low-residency MFA program.
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Text: Read poetry by Castillo at the Academy of American Poets