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Join us in welcoming Daisy Hernández and Lourdes Torres to the store for a reading and conversation in celebration of the 10th anniversary of Hernández's award-winning memoir, A Cup of Water Under My Bed.

In this lyrical, coming-of-age memoir, Daisy Hernández chronicles what the women in her Cuban-Colombian family taught her about love, money, and race. Her mother warns her about envidia and men who seduce you with pastries, while one tía bemoans that her niece is turning out to be “una india” instead of an American. Another auntie instructs that when two people are close, they are bound to become like uña y mugre, fingernails and dirt, and that no, Daisy’s father is not godless. He’s simply praying to a candy dish that can be traced back to Africa.

These lessons—rooted in women’s experiences of migration, colonization, y cariño—define in evocative detail what it means to grow up female in an immigrant home. In one story, Daisy sets out to defy the dictates of race and class that preoccupy her mother and tías, but dating women and transmen, and coming to identify as bisexual, leads her to unexpected questions. In another piece, NAFTA shuts local factories in her hometown on the outskirts of New York City, and she begins translating unemployment forms for her parents, moving between English and Spanish, as well as private and collective fears. In prose that is both memoir and commentary, Daisy reflects on reporting for the New York Times as the paper is rocked by the biggest plagiarism scandal in its history and plunged into debates about the role of race in the newsroom.

A heartfelt exploration of family, identity, and language, A Cup of Water Under My Bed is ultimately a daughter’s story of finding herself and her community, and of creating a new, queer life.

Daisy Hernández is a memoirist and journalist who writes about the intersections of race, immigration, class, and sexuality. She is the author of several books, including The Kissing Bug, which won the 2022 PEN /Jean Stein Book Award and was selected as an inaugural title for the National Book Foundation’s Science + Literature Program. Her journalism work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, and National Geographic. Hernández is an associate professor in the English Department at Northwestern University.

Lourdes Torres is Vincent de Paul Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at DePaul University where she is also affiliate faculty in Critical Ethnic Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research and teaching interests include sociolinguistics, Spanish in the U.S., and queer Latinidades. She is the author of Puerto Rican Discourse: A Sociolinguistic Study of a New York Suburb, co-author of Spanish in Chicago and co-editor of Latino Studies: A 20th Anniversary Reader, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, and Tortilleras: Hispanic and the Latina Lesbian Expressions. She is currently working on a history of LLEGÓ, The National Latino/a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Organization that ran from 1987 to 2004 and advocated for queer Latinx issues.