Join us to hear Daisy Hernández discuss her book, “The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation's Neglect of a Deadly Disease,” the 2024-2025 One Book, One U selection for the University of Miami.
Named by Time magazine as a top 10 best nonfiction book of 2021, and selected as a Finalist for the New American Voices Award and for the National Book Foundation’s Science + Literature program, “The Kissing Bug” was inspired by Hernández’s own family story.
Growing up in a New Jersey factory town in the 1980s, Hernández believed that her aunt had become deathly ill from eating an apple. No one in her family, in either the United States or Colombia, spoke of infectious diseases. Even into her thirties, she only knew that her aunt had died of Chagas, a rare and devastating illness that affects the heart and digestive system. But as Hernández dug deeper, she discovered that Chagas—or the kissing bug disease—is more prevalent in the United States than the Zika virus.
Through unsparing, gripping, and humane portraits, Hernández chronicles a story vast in scope and urgent in its implications, exposing how poverty, racism, and public policies have conspired to keep this disease hidden. A riveting and nuanced investigation into racial politics and for-profit healthcare in the United States, “The Kissing Bug” reveals the intimate history of a marginalized disease and connects us to the lives at the center of it all.
A question and answer session will follow the presentation, and the author will be available to sign the book at the conclusion of the event.
