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Pilsen Community Books is honored to welcome Daisy Hernández and A. Naomi Paik to the store for a reading and fundraiser for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR). Hernández's newest book is Citizenship, a provocative, personal, blazingly intelligent examination of one of the most vexing questions facing the United States today: Who is, and should be, a citizen?

In this one-of-a-kind book, Daisy Hernández fiercely interrogates one of the most complicated subjects of contemporary life and politics: citizenship. Braiding memoir, history, and cultural criticism, she exposes the truths and lies of how we define ourselves as a country and a people. Turning to her own family’s stories—her mother arrived from Colombia, while her father was a political refugee from Castro’s Cuba—Hernández shows how the very idea of citizenship is a myth, one of the stories we tell ourselves about the American soul and psyche.

Reframing our understanding of what it means to be an American, Citizenship is an urgent and necessary account of the laws, customs, and language we use to include and exclude, especially those who come from Latin America. With her scholar’s mind and memoirist’s gift for narrative, Hernández weaves a story both personal and national, while reckoning with our country’s ongoing debate about who belongs and providing fresh ways of thinking about citizenship. At once bracing, fearless, and tender, Citizenship is a powerful portrait of one family’s experiences in the borderlands of citizenship and an honest illumination of the country in which we live.

Daisy Hernández is the author of The Kissing Bug, winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the inaugural title for the National Book Foundation’s Science + Literature Program. Her memoir, A Cup of Water Under My Bed, won Lambda Literary’s Dr. Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award and was a Publishing Triangle Award finalist. She co-edited the classic feminist anthology Colonize This! and is an associate professor of creative writing at Northwestern University.

A. Naomi Paik is the author of Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the 21st Century and Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II. She coedited four special issues of the Radical History Review on militarism and capitalism, sanctuary, policing, and the Anthropocene. She coedits the “Borderlands” section of Public Books and “The Politics of Sanctuary” blog at the Smithsonian. She is a part of the Migration Scholars Collaborative and a founding member of the Sanctuary Campus Network and Sanctuary for All UIC. She is an associate professor of Criminology, Law, and Justice and Global Asian Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago.