Bernadine Marie Hernandez Receives Three Literary Awards for New Book

Bernadine Marie Hernández , associate professor in the department of English at the University of New Mexico, has won three national awards for her book Border Bodies: Racialized Sexuality, Sexual Capital, and Violence in the Nineteenth-Century Borderlands (University of North Carolina Press, 2022).

Dr. Hernández was awarded the 2024 Book of Year by the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies, as well as the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education. She also received an honorable mention for the 2023 Gloría Anzaldúa Book Award from the National Women’s Studies Association. In her award-winning book, Dr. Hernandez highlights stories of women in the Southwestern United States, thereby tracing a history of sexual violence in the borderlands during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The research she conducted for her book involved examining newspapers, letters, testimonies, court cases, short stories, and photographs from archives at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Texas at Austin.

“I am very grateful, honored and humbled that the book has won three prestigious, national awards,” Dr. Hernández said. “I am grateful to the award committees for reading the book with care, reading the book with love, and really thinking about what the book means in the broader contemporary moment.”

Dr. Hernández holds a master’s degree in English literature from the University of New Mexico and Ph.D. from the University of California San Diego