Daisy Hernández — Citizenship: Notes on an American Myth - Lupita Aquino

This event is in partnership with FreeDC.A provocative, personal, blazingly intelligent examination of one of the most vexing questions facing the United States today: Who is, and should be, a citizen?In this one-of-a-kind book, Daisy Hernández fiercely interrogates one of the most complicated subjects of contemporary life and politics: citizenship. Braiding memoir, history, and cultural criticism, she exposes the truths and lies of how we define ourselves as a country and a people. Turning to her own family’s stories—her mother arrived from Colombia, while her father was a political refugee from Castro’s Cuba—Hernández shows how the very idea of citizenship is a myth, one of the stories we tell ourselves about the American soul and psyche.Reframing our understanding of what it means to be an American, Citizenship is an urgent and necessary account of the laws, customs, and language we use to include and exclude, especially those who come from Latin America. With her scholar’s mind and memoirist’s gift for narrative, Hernández weaves a story both personal and national, while reckoning with our country’s ongoing debate about who belongs and providing fresh ways of thinking about citizenship. At once bracing, fearless, and tender, Citizenship is a powerful portrait of one family’s experiences in the borderlands of citizenship and an honest illumination of the country in which we live.Daisy Hernández is the author of The Kissing Bug, winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the inaugural title for the National Book Foundation’s Science + Literature Program. Her memoir, A Cup of Water Under My Bed, won Lambda Literary’s Dr. Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award and was a Publishing Triangle Award finalist. She co-edited the classic feminist anthology Colonize This! and is an associate professor of creative writing at Northwestern University.Hernández is in conversation with Lupita Aquino, better known as @Lupita.Reads on Instagram and TikTok, passionately spreads her love for books online. She has moderated numerous book events and founded La Comunidad Reads, an author-inclusive book club in partnership with the DC Public Library. Alongside her vibrant online presence, she has contributed insightful book coverage to outlets such as TODAY.com, Aster(ix) Literary Journal, She Reads, The Washington Independent Review of Books, and many more. Notably, Lupita has served as a judge for the 2024 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the 2023 Louise Meriwether First Prize for the Feminist Press, and was on the Selection Committee for the Aspen Words Literary Prize in 2021. She enjoys exploring local bookstores and libraries with her wife and son when not immersed in books.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593730171?ic_referral=BgNDZh9ndDd6rD80kn0zKbmyvemAK84L8h3c2GkrjTIwM3wEbEdQQfcautD2GHbIeUBTs-wZjGN15vyH_6Wk_bTSS_NJViPTjvX5mx8lBQCRqoDQTbaW3REzSXREpgQcnr65Bn4