Juan Felipe Herrera

A poem from Juan Felipe Herrera’s 2020 collection Every Day We Get More Illegal was written “in conversation” with the photography portfolio of a high school senior from New York City. The first Latino poet to serve as California’s poet laureate (2012-2014), and then as the Library of Congress’s Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry (2015-2017), Herrera was a writer of significant accomplishment—so perhaps crafting verse in communion with a teenager’s art might be surprising. Yet for Herrera, poetry is an art, a form of inspiration, an action of service. 

“As an educator for the last fifty years I want to display the lives of all groups and to present as many cultural landscapes as possible,” Herrera says. “With my writing I want to scrape away negative ideologies, stereotypes, distorted perceptions of the migrant and immigrant human beings seeking a better life. I want to heal all.” 

Born in Fowler, California, in 1948, Herrera’s parents were migrant farmworkers. Both born in Mexico, they met in El Paso, Texas. “We were a tiny family that lived on roadsides, in a makeshift trailer pulled by an ancient Army truck my father drove to find and pick crops,” Herrera says. The sights and stories of his childhood continue to anchor his writing. “I am very interested in the stories, life-views, predicaments, and, most of all, the migrant and immigrant border experience—the question of deportations, family separation, and their suffering,” he says. 

Herrera studied social anthropology; first at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he earned a BA in 1972, and then at Stanford, where he received his MA in 1980. Herrera’s work with experimental theater at UCLA informed his blossoming interest in poetry, both as a writer and as an educator. He graduated from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1990, and began teaching at California State University, Fresno. 

Herrera’s poems are omnivorous and playful, and yet also contemplative; in works like “Open,” nature is juxtaposed with death: “as the leaf as the sidewalk as the tear & the iris as the casket / upon visitation.” Elsewhere, he writes: “we are merely / seekers wanderers / moving alongside / the mountains.” Herrera’s deft verse is marked by inventive syntax, as well as conversation between the present and legacy—between the human and the transcendent. 

“We are part of humanity, and global humanity is part of us. These days we seem to lack that kind of personal collective membership,” Herrera laments. His art and activism have brought him around the world: “Africa, Mexico, Latin America, endangered cultures and villages as well—Lacandón Mayas of the abused rainforests in Chiapas, Darfur, Sudan, the trek through the Sahel desert and on.” 

Herrera’s energy and wit fuel his mission. “Poetry is not just a pretty rhyme, it can bring us consolation, healing and forgiveness, and, most of all, it can knock on our doors and give us a bowl of kindness,” he says. His aspirational hopes for the art form are anchored in his originality and ability to shift both register and rhythm. 

Among his more than 30 books are Akrílica (1989), a stylistically innovative, dual-language collection; Cinnamon Girl: Letters Found Inside a Cereal Box (2005), a novel in verse and letters that dramatizes a young Puerto Rican woman’s response to 9/11; and Notes on the Assemblage (2015), an elegiac collection in response to mass shootings, that ends with a call for artistic creation: “you have a poem to offer / it is made of action—you must / search for it.” 

The prolific Herrera has also received a litany of awards, among them a MacArthur Fellowship, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Book Critics Circle Award, two Latino Hall of Fame Awards—and, in 2022, a bilingual elementary school in Fresno that bears his name. 

Of all his recognitions, that final one is perhaps the most poignant. For half a century, Herrera’s poetry has been inextricable from his teaching. As U.S. poet laureate, Herrera cultivated several artistic and educational projects, including La Casa de Colores, a project that he once described as being “for all colors, all voices.” Herrera invited submissions of verse on various themes—veterans, family, migrants—and wove them into an epic poem. Additionally, he wrote a series of poems showcasing materials in the Library of Congress, from California folk music to a copy of España en el corazón / Spain in Our Hearts by Pablo Neruda, fashioned from the pulp of the uniforms of soldiers who died in the Spanish Civil War. 

That book prompted Herrera to wonder: “Can poetry be such a gift and can it be loved so deeply, even in bloody upheaval and turmoil?” In his poetic response to Neruda and war, Herrera concludes: “I sing to you / In spite of the flames around us / I sing to you.” 

—Nick Ripatrazone