Bio

Nicole Arocho Hernández is a poet from Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico. She holds a BA in Writing from Ithaca College and is an MFA Candidate in Poetry at Arizona State University (ASU). She teaches composition and poetry at ASU and is the Translations Editor and a Poetry Reader at Hayden's Ferry Review.

She writes about colonialism, collective grief, the relationship between self and nation, law and debt as fictions, and Puerto Rican cotidianidad, among other topics. She is experimenting with form and visual-hybrid textures as an extension of the body, as an expression of movement; the felt but unsayable.

Her poems have been featured in The Acentos Review, The Academy of American Poets, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, I Have No Ocean, was published online by Sundress Publications. Her second chapbook is forthcoming this fall with Glass Poetry Press. She is the recipient of the 2021 Katherine C. Turner Prize, an Academy of American Poets Prize.

Her writing has been supported by the 92Y Utenberg Poetry Center, the Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at ASU, among others. She has been a resident in Rockvale Writer's Colony and The Hambidge Center. She has been accepted and/or participated in workshops with Tin House, VONA Voices, Banff Centre, and elsewhere.