25 years of writing from one of our most gifted Latinx poets, featuring work from early explorations of machismo to new meditations on life as a single father, immigrant detention, and spiritual inquiry Some of the Light gathers the first 25 years of Hernandez's award-winning poetry, offering 28 new poems and a glimpse at the trajectory of a rising contemplative American author. At its core, Some of the Light contains collected poems of love, told through the lens of a single father raising two children alone in the borderlands. They are at times intimate and confessional, ranging from personal relationships to spiritual inquiry, from human rights to the environment, while between the cracks of the poems are poetic contemplations, chronicling the passing days of the pandemic. This latest work by Hernandez reveals a writer whom former US poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera calls "a titan--unafraid to take to the road, get his hands dirty, to fully immerse himself in the world of his subjects." Some of the Light is a part of Beacon Press's Raised Voices poetry series, established in 2021 to raise historically excluded voices and perspectives, and to celebratepoetry's ability to access truths in ways no other form can.

Some of the Light: New and Selected Poems (Raised Voices)

Literature & Fiction

Hernandez, Tim Z.

Genre Fiction

Beacon Press

Natural Takeover of Small Things is a collection of poetry that offers an unflinching view of “California’s Heartland,” the San Joaquin Valley. In his distinctive, lyrical, pull-no-punches style, Tim Z. Hernandez offers a glimpse of the people, the landscape, the rhythm, and the detritus of the rural West. As Hernandez peels back the façade of the place, he reveals that home is not always where the heart is. The book opens with an image of Fresno as “the inexhaustible nerve/in the twitching leg of a dog/three hours after being smashed/beneath the retread wheel/of a tomato truck en route to/a packing house that was raided/by the feds just days before the harvest.” It ends with “Adios, Fresno,” an astringent farewell to the city: “You can keep your fields,/the sun will follow me./I won’t reconsider./I’ve overstayed my welcome/by three generations.” By then, we have toured the breadth of the San Joaquin Valley, have tasted Fuyu persimmons and lengua, have witnessed a home crumbling to foreclosure, and listened to the last words of a dying campesino. We’re made aware that this is an atmosphere scented by an entirely organic stew—a melding of culture, objects, and forms. This is a place where rubble mirrors the refuse of lives. But garbage is also compost. And if we squint, we can see through the wreckage a few small patches where love could be taking root and hope might actually be sprouting.

Natural Takeover of Small Things (Camino del Sol)

United States

University of Arizona Press

Mañana Means Heaven (Camino del Sol)

In this love story of impossible odds, award-winning writer Tim Z. Hernandez weaves a rich and visionary portrait of Bea Franco, the real woman behind famed American author Jack Kerouac’s “The Mexican Girl.” Set against an ominous backdrop of California in the 1940s, deep in the agricultural heartland of the Great Central Valley, Mañana Means Heaven reveals the desperate circumstances that lead a married woman to an illicit affair with an aspiring young writer traveling across the United States. When they meet, Franco is a migrant farmworker with two children and a failing marriage, living with poverty, violence, and the looming threat of deportation, while the “college boy” yearns to one day make a name for himself in the writing world. The significance of their romance poses vastly different possibilities and consequences. Mañana Means Heaven deftly combines fact and fiction to pull back the veil on one of literature’s most mysterious and evocative characters. Inspired by Franco’s love letters to Kerouac and Hernandez’s interviews with Franco, now in her nineties and living in relative obscurity, the novel brings this lost gem of a story out of the shadows and into the spotlight.

All They Will Call You is the harrowing account of “the worst airplane disaster in California’s history,” which claimed the lives of thirty-two passengers, including twenty-eight Mexican citizens—farmworkers who were being deported by the U.S. government. Outraged that media reports omitted only the names of the Mexican passengers, American folk icon Woody Guthrie penned a poem that went on to become one of the most important protest songs of the twentieth century, “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee).” It was an attempt to restore the dignity of the anonymous lives whose unidentified remains were buried in an unmarked mass grave in California’s Central Valley. For nearly seven decades, the song’s message would be carried on by the greatest artists of our time, including Pete Seeger, Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez, yet the question posed in Guthrie’s lyrics, “Who are these friends all scattered like dry leaves?” would remain unanswered—until now.
Combining years of painstaking investigative research and masterful storytelling, award-winning author Tim Z. Hernandez weaves a captivating narrative from testimony, historical records, and eyewitness accounts, reconstructing the incident and the lives behind the legendary song. This singularly original account pushes narrative boundaries, while challenging perceptions of what it means to be an immigrant in America, but more importantly, it renders intimate portraits of the individual souls who, despite social status, race, or nationality, shared a common fate one frigid morning in January 1948.

All They Will Call You (Camino del Sol)

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

<div>A haunting, an obsession, a calling: Tim Z. Hernandez has been searching for people his whole life. Now, in this highly anticipated memoir, he takes us along on an investigative odyssey through personal and collective history to uncover the surprising conjunctions that bind our stories together. Hernandez's mission to find the families of the twenty-eight Mexicans who were killed in the 1948 plane wreck at Los Gatos Canyon formed the basis for his acclaimed documentary novel All They Will Call You, which the San Francisco Chronicle dubbed "a stunning piece of investigative journalism," and the New York Times hailed as "painstaking detective work by a writer who is the descendant of farmworkers." In this riveting new work, Hernandez continues his search for the plane crash victims while also turning the lens on himself and his ancestral past, revealing the tumultuous and deeply intimate experiences that have fueled his investigations--a lifelong journey haunted by memory, addiction, generational trauma, and the spirit world. They Call You Back is the true chronicle of one man's obsession to restore dignity to an undignified chapter in America's past, while at the same time making a case for why we must heal our personal wounds if we are ever to heal our political ones. &nbsp;</div>

They Call You Back: A Lost History, A Search, A Memoir (Camino del Sol)

Skin Tax

Poetry

Heyday Books

Breathing, In Dust (The Americas Series)

Deep within California’s golden agricultural heartland lies a rotten core: the fictional farming community of Catela, where the desperate realities of poverty, drug abuse, violence, and bigotry play out in the lives of cucarachas and coyotes, tweekers and strippers, wetbacks and white trash. Seventeen-year-old Tlaloc, namesake of the Aztec god of fertility and destruction, has grown up among the migrant-worker communities that follow the seasons from Wyoming’s beet fields to the vineyards and packinghouses of the Central Valley. Bearing witness to a gritty landscape of wrenching contrasts, Loc narrates the bitter desires and crushed hopes of his friends and family: his father’s absence and his grandparents’ deaths, Zeta’s reckless abandon, Arturín’s path to prison, Norma’s tragic alienation, the farmworkers’ final tributes to Cesar Chavez, Talina’s choices and compromises. Even so he dares to dream, sensing that somewhere within the cruel beauty that surrounds him may lie his own redemption. Tim Z. Hernandez’s land of pain and plenty, his Catela, evokes the essence of the migrant underclass experience. But more, his stories take us there, into the streets and into the groves, into the back rooms of the carnicerias and the panaderias, onto the tracks, onto the thirsty highways, in scenes that unfold with graphic, breathtaking honesty.

Literary

Texas Tech University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hernandez, Tim Z.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Hernandez, Tim Z.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hernandez, Tim Z.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Some of the Light: New and Selected Poems (Raised Voices)

Natural Takeover of Small Things (Camino del Sol)

Mañana Means Heaven (Camino del Sol)

Mañana Means Heaven (Camino del Sol)

All They Will Call You (Camino del Sol)

All They Will Call You (Camino del Sol)

They Call You Back: A Lost History, A Search, A Memoir (Camino del Sol)

Skin Tax

Breathing, In Dust (The Americas Series)

Breathing, In Dust (The Americas Series)