Poetry Workshop Day

Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents a poetry workshop with acclaimed Mexican poet and translator Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, “Poetry in the Age of Pandemics.”

 As the months of the pandemic wear on, it has been increasingly difficult for creative individuals to stay productive. In the wake of uncertainty, overwhelming chaos, and general apathy at the state of the world, it can be incredibly difficult to put pen to paper. We may ask ourselves, what can art do?  In this workshop with Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, we will work through exercises to not only stimulate writer’s block, but also investigate the virtues that we can learn from the distances that have grown between ourselves and give light to the narratives that have sprouted in these uncertain times. We will make art that can restore, heal, and awaken our sensibilities to the pain around us. We will create original texts that will bear witness to the power of art to make substantial change in our lives.

Our workshop will be held on Saturday, October 16, 2021 from 10:00am to 2:00pm with a musical interlude.

$15.00    Please register and access Zoom link via Eventbrite. 

“Castillo compresses the emotional resonances of lived experience into poetic narratives of devotion, eroticism, family, labor, and migration. He make displays of fragility and power by turn, a duality drawn into relief by the precarious condition of the undocumented immigrant.” –Publisher’s Weekly

“In the spirit of Whitman, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo slips in silently to lie down between the bridegroom and the bride, to inhabit many bodies and many souls, between rapture and grief.” –DA Powell

“Castillo’s forms feel airy and fragile, but the strength of his revelations are unquestionable.” –Major Jackson

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is a poet, essayist, translator, and immigration advocate. He is the author of Cenzontle (BOA editions, 2018), chosen by Brenda Shaughnessy as the winner of the 2017 A. Poulin Jr. prize and winner of the 2018 Northern California Book Award. Cenzontle maps a parallel between the landscape of the border and the landscape of sexuality through surreal and deeply imagistic poems. Castillo’s first chapbook, Dulce (Northwestern University Press, 2018), was chosen by Chris Abani, Ed Roberson, and Matthew Shenoda as the winner of the Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize. 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.

He is the translator of the Argentinian modernist poet, Jacobo Fijman and is currently at work translating the poems of the contemporary Mexican Peruvian poet Yaxkin Melchy whose poems combine digital, environmental, and indigenous studies into a cosmopolitan melée specific to Mexico City. Castillo also co-translated the work of the Mexican poet Marcelo Uribe with C.D. Wright before her untimely passing.

Castillo’s work has been adopted to Opera through collaboration with the composer Reinaldo Moya and his work has appeared or been featured in The New York Times, PBS Newshour, People Magazine en Español, The Paris Review, Fusion TV, Buzzfeed, Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, New England Review, and Indiana Review, among others. He currently teaches in the Low-Res MFA program at Ashland University. He lives in Marysville, California, with his wife and son.