The Puerto Rican Literature Project

Nicole Arocho Hernández (1992) was born in Moca and raised in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico. She holds a BA in writing from Ithaca College and is an MFA candidate in poetry at Arizona State University, where she serves as translation editor at Hayden’s Ferry Review. Arocho Hernández is a 2021 Pushcart Prize Nominee and received the 2021 Katherine C. Turner Prize, an Academy of American Poets University & College Poetry Prize, for the poem “Puerto Rican Haikus.” Her work has been published in The Acentos Review, Variant Literature Journal, We Are Not Alone: A Community Building Art Works Anthology, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. She authored the e-chapbook I Have No Ocean (Sundress Publications, 2021), and a printed chapbook, How can colonized see light –, (Glass Poetry Press, forthcoming). Some of Arocho Hernández’s literary influences include Julia de Burgos, Esteban Valdés, Solmaz Sharif, Natalie Diaz, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Federico García Lorca, Suzane y Aimé Césaire, Mayra Santos-Febres, Prudencio Hernández, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Pedro Pietri, Willie Perdomo, Martín Espada, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, Dionne Brand, Cecilia Vicuña, Don Mee Choi, and Urayoán Noel. 

Works Cited

Arocho Hernández, Nicole. Interview. Conducted by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, 2 Sept. 2022