Juan Felipe Herrera

Juan Felipe Herrera (born December 27, 1948, Fowler, California, U.S.) is an American poet, author, and activist of Mexican descent who became the first Hispanic American to serve as U.S. poet laureate (2015–17). He is known for his often-bilingual and autobiographical poems on immigration, Chicano identity, and life in California. Indeed, he cites California—its people, culture, and landscape—as well as Bob Dylan and the folk song movement, poets Allen Ginsberg and Federico García Lorca, and playwright Luis Valdez among the sources of inspiration for his work.

Background and education

Herrera was born to migrant farmworkers in southern California and spent his early youth on the move, living in tents and trailers in small farming towns throughout the San Joaquin Valley. Herrera and his family eventually settled in San Diego. After completing high school there in 1967, Herrera attended the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), with an Educational Opportunity Program scholarship. At UCLA he studied social anthropology and participated in experimental theater. While in college he became active in the Chicano civil rights movement, a cause he has stayed committed to throughout his career. He earned a B.A. from UCLA in 1972 and continued his studies in social anthropology at Stanford University (M.A., 1980). He moved to the San Francisco area, where he wrote poetry and also taught poetry to elementary-school through college-age students.

Poetry and career

Herrera had published three books of poetry before attending the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1988 (M.F.A., 1990). Soon after graduating from Iowa, he was appointed professor in the Chicano and Latin American Studies Department at California State University, Fresno (1990–2004). He published prolifically during the 1990s, including the first of several picture books for children, Calling the Doves/El canto de las palomas (1995), a bilingual telling of the author’s nomadic childhood among migrant farmworkers. It won the 1997 Ezra Jack Keats Book Award for children’s literature written by new children’s book authors. His books of poetry from that period include Night Train to Tuxtla: New Stories and Poems (1994), Mayan Drifter: Chicano Poet in the Lowlands of America (1997), and Lotería Cards & Fortune Poems: A Book of Lives and Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream (both 1999). In 1999 he also published CrashBoomLove: A Novel in Verse, a book for young adults that tells the story of a Mexican American teenager living in California.

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In addition to writing, Herrera has stayed involved in bilingual theater and performance, cofounding a number of theater ensembles and directing performances throughout his career. His children’s book The Upside Down Boy (2000) was adapted into a musical (The Upside Down Boy: A Latino Musical) and premiered in New York City in 2004. In 2005 Herrera was appointed professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, and continued to publish his poetry and prose. He retired from his university position in 2015.

Herrera’s books 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border: Undocuments 1971–2007 (2007) and Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems (2008) were particularly well received. The former—a compilation of text, illustrations, and photographs spanning nearly four decades that document life on the road in and between California and Mexico—won the PEN West Poetry Award and the PEN Oakland National Literary Award for 2008. Half of the World in Light also covered his career, introduced new work, and came with a CD of Herrera reading 24 of his poems. That publication earned the 2009 PEN Beyond Margins Award (now the PEN Open Book Award), awarded to “outstanding books by writers of color.” Notes on the Assemblage (2015) piquantly investigates violence and social injustice through juxtaposed Spanish and English verse.

In 2011 Herrera was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, a post he held until 2016. During this time he was California’s poet laureate (2012–14), the first Latino to hold the position since its founding in 1915, and in 2015–17 he was the 21st U.S. poet laureate, the first Latino to serve in that position. One year after his tenure as U.S. poet laureate ended, he published Jabberwalking, an inspirational book for children that encourages them to write poetry. Herrera’s experiences traveling the United States as poet laureate also inspired the collection Every Day We Get More Illegal (2020).

In 2021 Herrera’s 1974 poetry collection Rebozos of Love/We Have Woven/Sudor de Pueblos/On Our Back was republished under the title Rebozos of Love: Floricanto 1970–1974. That same year his poem “Sunriders” was engraved on a plaque that was launched into space on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Lucy spacecraft, which was the first U.S. spacecraft to visit the Trojan asteroids that orbit the Sun with Jupiter but ahead of and behind the planet at the Lagrange points. In 2022 Herrera published Akrílica, a book in translation.

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Honors

Among Herrera’s many honors, he was the recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2022 and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2024. The Juan Felipe Herrera Elementary School, a bilingual school in Fresno, opened in 2022.