Another end-of-year wrap-up that nobody asked for.
I’m not going to bore you with some tale of woe about all the personal life challenges 2025 brought to me and my loved ones. We all face those, year in and year out, and some years are tougher than others, and in the end, it’s all relative. Suffice it to say that I’m a fortunate person and I try to be grateful for all of life’s blessings.
So instead, I will bore you with a listicle about my year in writing.
Continue reading “The year in numbers”‘I think I always wanted to be a rockstar or musician growing up. Poetry was a way for me to be like a one-man band.’
My American friends think I’m too Mexican.
My Mexican friends think I’m too American.
My Mexican American friends are my road dogs.– Jose Hernandez Diaz, “Ballad of the West Coast Mexican American/Chicanx”
These opening lines to the first poem in Jose Hernandez Diaz‘s 2024 collection, Bad Mexican, Bad American capture the essence of Mexican American identity, the feeling of being caught between two cultures and never fully at home in either.
It’s a recurring theme in this writer’s prose poems and free verse, which explore first-generation identity, surrealism, cultural hybridity, among other themes. But his writings encompass broader, universal themes and issues. As one review describes it, Bad Mexican, Bad American “effectively and thankfully eludes simple categorization, refusing both assimilation and accommodation.”
A native of southern California, Jose studied English and creative writing at Cerritos Community College, the University of California Berkeley, and Antioch University Los Angeles. His poetry has appeared in several literary journals, including Yale Review, Southern Review, and Poetry. He also is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020) and two new collections, The Parachutist (Sundress Publications, 2025) and Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man (Red Hen Press, 2025). In 2017, he was named a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellow. As a writer in residence at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a frequent presenter, he shares his writing expertise with other aspiring writers.
Continue reading “Friday Five: ‘Bad Mexican, Bad American’ author and poet Jose Hernandez Diaz”
Andy writes! 