Daisy Hernández

Daisy Hernández is an American journalist and author whose work sits at the intersection of science, public health, immigration, and personal narrative. She is an associate professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation's Neglect of a Deadly Disease (2021) won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and was a finalist for several other awards. The book braids investigative reporting on Chagas disease—a neglected tropical illness—with a personal family memoir, examining how race, immigration status, and medical neglect intersect in the United States. Hernández is also the author of A Cup of Water Under My Bed (2014), a memoir about growing up between cultures in New Jersey and navigating her family's Colombian and Cuban heritage. She was previously an editor at Ms. Magazine and has written for The Atlantic, NPR, and other outlets. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Michigan. Her work is known for its careful interweaving of public health data with deeply personal testimony, and for advocating for communities that have been historically overlooked by American medicine and journalism.