Eliana Hernández-Pachón is a Colombian writer, educator, editor, and cultural organizer. She is the author of La mata (Laguna Libros, 2020), which won Colombia’s National Poetry Prize in 2021. Its English edition, The Brush (Archipelago Books, 2024), translated by Robin Myers, was shortlisted for the 2025 National Translation Award in Poetry and named one of The Atlantic’s ten best books of 2024.

Hernández-Pachón is also the co-author of Plantas del camino, a chapbook about medicinal weeds that grow through the cracks of Bogotá’s streets. In 2022, she received the NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music and Theatre Grant, and in 2025 she was awarded a residency by the Hawthornden Foundation.

Her research on plants, affective knowledge, and collaborative and community-based art expands into both her creative and academic work. She is interested in the intersections between art, literature, and ecology, particularly in how the more-than-human world (plants, liquids, and earth) participates in contemporary artistic production in Latin America. She holds a B.A. in Anthropology from Universidad de los Andes, and a Ph.D. in Hispanic Literature from Cornell University.
Her academic writing has appeared in journals such as Iberoromania and [sic]. She also guest-edited the dossier Las plantas en el pensamiento y la literatura latinoamericanos (Plants in Latin American Thinking, Literature, and Visual Art), published in 2025 by Cuadernos de Literatura (Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Colombia).

Hernández-Pachón is the co-founder of Como un lugar, a small press and a cultural organization dedicated to fostering Latin American poetry in New York City. Her work as a cultural organizer has been supported by the Brooklyn Council on the Arts, Queens Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and NYSCA.

In 2024, she was the curator and editor of Un florero que se rompe / A Vase that Shatters, a collection of texts by members of Colombia’s Truth Commission, part of the project Transperformations: Breathing Machines Across the World.
2026