J K Hernandez

J.K. Hernandez is a queer Afro-Latina writer and artist, raised by her grandmother between the Bronx, New York, and Dorchester, Boston. A first-generation college graduate of George Washington University, she has always carried an artist’s heart: painting, drawing, and writing poetry alongside her fiction.

A lover girl at her core, Hernandez is a big romantic who fell in love with literature through the words of Black writers like Toni Morrison. She first discovered her own voice through the pages of her journals, where love, longing, and loss became language. Her debut novel, The Color Jade, was born from her own love and grief, as well as the stories she witnessed in her community and carried deep within herself.

Family remains central to her life and her work. As an older sibling of five, Hernandez writes with the same devotion she feels toward her family: a fierce tenderness, a loyalty to truth, and a belief in the beauty and resilience of her people