Join Tacoma Public Library and the City of Tacoma for our keynote Tacoma Reads event, a conversation with author of Children of the Land Marcelo Hernandez Castillo and Mayor Victoria Woodards.

Children of the Land is an unforgettable memoir from a prize-winning poet about growing up undocumented in the United States. The novel recounts the sorrows and joys of a family torn apart by draconian policies and chronicles one young man’s attempt to build a future in a nation that denies his existence.

Registration for this event will open on Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2020. A discussion with Marcelo Hernandez Castillo and City of Tacoma Mayor Woodards will be followed with a moderated Q&A. The event will be hosted on Zoom.

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is a poet, essayist, translator, and immigration advocate. His memoir Children of the Land (Harper Collins, 2020) is his most recent publication and explores the ideas of separation from deportation, trauma, and mobility between borders.

Castillo was born in Zacatecas, Mexico and immigrated at the age of five with his family to the California central valley. As an AB540 student, he earned his B.A. from Sacramento State University and was the first undocumented student to graduate from the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan. His immigration case was used by the Supreme Court to justify the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) under president Obama. Castillo is a founding member of the Undocupoets campaign which successfully eliminated citizenship requirements from all major first poetry book prizes in the country and was recognized with the Barnes and Noble “Writers for Writers” award from Poets & Writers Magazine. Through a literary partnership with Amazon Publishing, he has helped to establish The Undocupoet Fellowship which provides funding to help curb the cost of submissions to journals and contests.

Tacoma Reads is a city-wide reading program that seeks to unite the community in dialogue around contemporary themes through reading a common text.

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