UNM English Professor’s book earns three national awards
February 9, 2024 - Carly Bowling
A book about gender and sexual violence in the borderland written by Bernadine Marie Hernández, an associate professor in the University of New Mexico Department of English, has earned three literary awards in the past month.
In her multi-genre book, “Border Bodies: Racialized Sexuality, Sexual Capital, and Violence in the Nineteenth-Century Borderlands,” author Hernández argues that the bodies of women of color were the linchpins of capitalist production in the United States-Mexico borderlands. Through newspapers and periodicals, letters, testimonios, court cases, short stories, and photographs from 1834 to 1912, Hernández spotlights lesser-known stories of women in the Southwest.
Border Bodies was recently selected as the 2024 Book of the Year by both the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies and the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education. The book also earned Honorable Mention in the National Women's Studies Association’s 2023 Gloría Anzaldúa Book Award and has garnered positive reviews in Ms. Magazine, CHOICE, and Axios among other publications.
Full story at UNM Newsroom
