From TinHouse Press: "Growing up in a New Jersey factory town in the 1980s, Daisy Hernández believed that her aunt had become deathly ill from eating an apple. No one in her family, in either the United States or Colombia, spoke of infectious diseases. Even into her thirties, she only knew that her aunt had died of Chagas, a rare and devastating illness that affects the heart and digestive system. But as Hernández dug deeper, she discovered that Chagas -- or the kissing bug disease -- is more prevalent in the United States than the Zika virus."
Daisy Hernández is the author of The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease (Tin House, 2021), which won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and was selected as an inaugural title for the National Book Foundation’s Science + Literature Program. The book was named a top 10 nonfiction book of 2021 by Time magazine and was a finalist for the New American Voices Award. She has spoken about the subject of her book—neglected disease and racial disparities in healthcare—on MSBNC and also with the Carter Center and the Pan American Health Organization.
A journalist, she has reported for National Geographic, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Slate, and her writing has been aired on NPR's All Things Considered. Her magazine feature on transgender issues in communities of color was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award.
She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Djerassi Artist-in-Residence, Blue Mountain Center, and Hedgebrook, and she currently serves on the board of the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Northwestern University.
Image and bio c/o https://www.daisyhernandez.com/