Art is

San Joaquin Valley that are familiar. But the language he was using, the language that a lot of writers from the area we’re using, did not resonate with me,” he says. “I had something grittier to say.”

He left California for the forests of Colorado, where he attended college and sought to find his voice as a writer.

“I just felt like I had to get far away from home. I knew that because the San Joaquin Valley had a long literary legacy, and I didn’t want to sound like everybody else and come out of that same machine. So I had to get away,” he explains. “The only place that made sense to me was to go somewhere where it was green, and in a way, that I never knew that didn’t look like anything I grew up around. To me, it was the Colorado Rockies.”

After college, he returned to California and started a family, which upped the ante when it comes to his artistic need to create art.

“When I had children, it felt even more urgent to write. I felt suddenly like, ‘Okay, I need to make a life out of this,’” he explains. “Some of my friends who are artists and had children were always like ‘Don’t have kids, you’re never going to do what you want to do, you have to put all your dreams aside.’ And for me, it was the opposite: the moment I had children, it was like everything became urgent and necessary and vital.”

Hernandez’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, and more. His debut collection of poetry, Skin Tax, earned the American Book Award and is an exploration of masculinity. Before writing the collection, Hernandez, who was 20 at the time, lived with his mentor, a national poet laureate, and his wife who challenged the young poet.

“Masculinity is always something that has been at the forefront of anything that we’re doing. She’d say, ‘I would love to see a writer one day, a male writer, write about his own masculinity in an honest way, She said, ‘I challenge you to be that writer,’” Hernandez recalls. “That was my first teacher.”

Issues of masculinity impacted Hernandez not only as a writer, but also as a person experiencing machismo in different settings and situations throughout his life.

“Machismo is not just in Hispanic or Mexican circles. I saw it in white friends and asian friends whose dads were just as macho, so I’m always looking through that lens and thinking about the ways it translates into my writing,” he says.

Hernandez approaches his writing by way of resisting finger-pointing and applies introspection.

Hernandez’s life in El Paso is working out for the best as he remains mindful and kind to himself.

“I think to myself, ‘I’m going to make it as a dad as a single dad, I can do this. I’m going to write about it, I’m going to document it. I’m going to do this,” he says.

Hernandez quit drinking six years ago and says sobriety has enhanced his journey as a father and artist.

Hernandez is a single father, and brought his two children with him to El Paso after being offered a job teaching in the Creative Writing department at UTEP. Initially the adjustment was difficult, but he drew on ancestral strength to persevere.

Hernandez has an altar in his house that includes a photograph of his maternal grandfather who he never knew but still feels a connection to.

“His wife died when my mom was only 10 years old and he was left to raise children by himself, the youngest child was one,” he says. In addition to the trauma pursuant to the loss of his wife, his grandfather was a Korean war veteran struggling with alcoholism.

“He failed pretty quickly and all the kids were placed in foster homes,” says Hernandez.

Although Hernandez initially questioned making the move to El Paso, he found purpose in breaking cycles of generational trauma.

“I think I’m here to be a success as a single dad, not to follow my grandfather’s footsteps, but to use his story as a way to motivate and inspire me,” says Hernandez. “So, I gave him a more prominent place on my altar.”

“I wanted to be on-call as a dad 24/7 and handle my business,” he says. “Now, my kids are still here with me in El Paso and thriving. I’m publishing books, and I love it here. Then, I see my kids feel more at home here than anywhere else.”

Creative lifestyles are often romanticized with issues of addiction, substance abuse, and self-destruction but many writers, including Hernandez, have found creative avenues through healthy outlets.

“I started to feel like there is a potential inside of me and an untapped potential of everything, of being a human in the world and being a teacher. I knew there was untapped potential that I would never get to as long as I was drinking alcohol,” he says.

Now, his writing is more honest and bold.

“I was hiding a lot of my experiences and a lot of my pain. I had nowhere to put it, it was all going into the writing,” he says. “When you’re polishing a mirror, at first you’re afraid of what you see. Then, after a while, you start to stare at it and try to come to a different understanding. I felt like I was polishing the mirror every time I would write and am grateful for it. There’s nothing to hide anymore.”

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