Gustavo Hernandez
Biography
Gustavo Hernandez is the author of the poetry collections Bachelor (FlowerSong Press, 2025), which is a finalist for Lambda Literary Award, and Flower Grand First (Moon Tide Press, 2021). His work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, The Slowdown Podcast, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. He holds a degree in creative writing from California State University Long Beach. In January 2024, Hernandez was appointed Poet Laureate of Orange County, California. He was born in Jalisco, Mexico and was raised in Santa Ana, California, where he still resides.
Books
Gustavo Hernandez writes from the slippery threshold between the living and the dead, from “The last table before the dance floor.” These poems inhabit places-that-are, and then transfigure into places-that-once-were, like the Cienega, a swampland once inhabited by singing tree frogs, land tamed by “the hands and blades and bricks of ghosts,” and Jalisco, the mother/fatherland, where his morning run here, in Santa Ana, is also a “race from our plaza to the western borders of Tototlan.” Indeed, the poems’ speaker moves like a ghost, from affiliation to singularity and back again, from son, brother, uncle, lover, to a state of profound bachelorhood, a traveler moving through a house of mirrors who encounters and re-encounters himself. These are poems that Hernandez choreographs around a seed of stillness and silence, poems with the elegance of Meche Barba in a black and white film, who “dances under a white perfumy pseudonym.” Theirs is the syntax of the dead. Theirs is the understanding that nothing is just one thing; they “reject reduction” at every turn. Maybe that is why so many poems in this collection share the same title— “Bachelor,” “Husband,” “Nocturne,” “Son,” “I Can’t Settle on One Figure for a Sunset,” “Conclusion,” from mirror to mirror, an archetype turned in the hand like a cut diamond, each poem, a facet. In Bachelor, Hernandez has written a book like no other, inhabited by poems of the soul. – Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry