“Find Your Voice: An Interview with José Hernandez Diaz” by Rosa Melendez

Picture this: you’re 13 years old and crying in your middle-school bathroom. Emotions are bubbling up in your chest, and you don’t know how to get them out. Now, you’re 18 and about to finish high school. You’re certain you and your high school sweetheart are meant to be and the school of your dreams just accepted you with a full-ride scholarship. You’re beyond happy and so overwhelmed with positive feelings that you need to get out somehow: what do you do?
“When I’m writing, it’s therapeutic, in the sense that I need to get it out,” said published author and professional poet José Hernandez Diaz. “It’s more about what I feel at the moment, [...] when I write I have more selfish intentions.” To him, his pieces aren’t all about what’s going to be the next big hit or what the people want. When he writes, he writes about his life, his experiences, and his emotions.
José Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020). His work has been published or featured in The American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Crazyhorse, Georgia Review, Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Times, LitHub, The Nation, Poetry, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He has been a finalist for The Andrés Montoya Prize, The Colorado Prize, The Akron Prize, and The National Poetry Series. Currently, he is an Associate Editor at Frontier Poetry and a Guest Editor at Palette Poetry. He teaches creative writing online for Litro Magazine, Frontier Poetry, and other venues.
Hernandez Diaz started his literary journey in high school. He was a first generation Mexican American teenager who played football and was fairly average in his classes. It wasn’t until his teacher noticed him that he truly began to flourish into the poet he is today. Starting off by wanting to be a writer, it wasn’t until after he had finished getting his degree at UC Berkeley and took up a job in a library. It wasn’t until he found himself reading and studying the craft of poetry that José realized it was his calling.
One of the first pieces of Hernandez Diaz’s I was exposed to was titled, “The Seventh Grade.” Reading it took me back to my days in a primarily Hispanic, crappy middle school, where I got to witness friends and friends-of-friends experience the most confusing, awkward, and horrible years of their life. When asked about the inspiration for his poem, Hernandez Diaz responded that he “wanted to write about his first kiss and that experience,” while still trying to subtly bring up the “working class and conditions in South East LA and how an unstable homelife could be” because of poverty.
Reading “The Seventh Grade” awoke something in me. I looked at the words and didn’t just see them as letters, my mind painted them as images of my own childhood experiencing firsthand what it meant to be Hispanic in a community full of other Hispanics who felt like they had no choice in what their future would hold, so they stuck to what they knew: the stereotypes they were exposed to since a young age. In a sense, I related to Hernandez Diaz’s desire to write from the heart and from experiences. I suppose I always understood that that was what poetry was truly about, but hearing it and seeing it from someone who comes from a similar background as I do truly opened my eyes.
As a creative writing teacher, Hernandez Diaz “understands the importance of Latinx professionals” as “certain voices need to be heard,” but he also understands and likes the idea of “universal poetry for everyone.”
If I had to say anything about my conversation with Hernandez Diaz, it would be thank you. I’ve had a number of English teachers in my academic career and while I’m grateful for what they’ve shown me, I’ve never had the example of a successful Mexican American writer in my life, who wrote what he wanted and needed. The fire that powered my desire to pursue some kind of career in creative writing has been rekindled and, while I may not be on the same literary level as a professional author and poet, I too know that writing is “a marathon, not a sprint.”

ROSA Melendez

Rosa Melendez is the Program Manager for Issue Eight of MORIA Literary Magazine. Currently a senior in the Game Design program, she hopes to one day be able to make Indie games with her friends. When she isn’t playing video games or napping, she enjoys watching horror movies and coming up with stories for future games. She also really loves her grandma.