Here to Stay

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is the author of Cenzontle, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. prize (BOA editions 2018), winner of the 2019 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award in poetry, a finalist for the Norther California Book Award and named a best book of 2018 by NPR and the New York Public Library. As one of the founders of the Undocupoets campaign, he is a recipient of the Barnes and Noble “Writers for Writers” Award. He holds a 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 work has appeared or is featured in The New York Times, The Paris Review, People Magazine, and PBS Newshour, among others. He lives in Marysville, California where he teaches poetry to incarcerated youth and also teaches at the Ashland University Low-Res MFA program.

Born in the Philippines, Janine Joseph is a formerly undocumented poet, librettist, and the author of Decade of the Brain: Poems and the prize-winning Driving Without a License. Her poetry, essays, and critical writings have appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, the Atlantic, Poetry Northwest, Orion, Poets & Writers, and the Smithsonian’s “What It Means to Be American” project, and she has created works commissioned for the Houston Grand Opera, Washington Master Chorale, and Symphony New Hampshire. A recipient of Fellowships from MacDowell, Bread Loaf, and the Paul and Daisy Soros Foundation, Joseph is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Virginia Tech. She lives in Blacksburg, VA.

Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived as an undocumented immigrant in the United States for 21 years. She won the 2023 Alice James Award for her forthcoming debut book Cold Thief Place. Lin has been an artist-in-residence at Cité internationale, Paris; a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown; and a Wallace Stegner Fellow. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in Hyperallergic, New England Review, Sewanee Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Currently she is a critic-at-large for Poetry Northwest. She lives in Seattle.