Catherine Hernandez

Catherine Hernandez (she/her) is an award-winning author and screenwriter. She is a proud queer woman who is of Filipino, Spanish, Chinese and Indian descent and married into the Navajo Nation. Her first novel, Scarborough, won the Jim Wong-Chu Award for the unpublished manuscript; was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Awards, the Evergreen Forest of Reading Award, the Edmund White Award, and the Trillium Book Award; and a finalist for Canada Reads 2022. She has written the critically acclaimed plays Singkil, The Femme Playlist and Eating with Lola and the children’s books M Is for Mustache: A Pride ABC Book, I Promise and and Where Do Your Feelings Live? She wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of Scarborough. It was the 1st runner up for the coveted People’s Choice Award at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival, won the Shawn Mendes Foundation Changemaker Award, was nominated for 11 Canadian Screen Awards and won 8, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. Her second novel, Crosshairs, published simultaneously in Canada and the US and the UK, was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award and made the CBC’s Best Canadian Fiction, NOW Magazine’s 10 Best Books, Indigo Best Book, Audible Best Audiobooks and NBC 20 Best LGBTQ Books list of 2020. Her third novel, The Story of Us, about the extraordinary friendship between a caregiver and her elderly client, was published this year by HarperCollins Canada and was an instant bestseller. She is currently working on a few television projects and her fourth novel.

Catherine is a DD 2006 short form alum and worked with Rabindranath Maharaj