Wyoming Arts Council

Juan Felipe Herrera to become United States’ first Latino poet laureate

Featured News | June 10, 2015

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From the National Public Radio web site:

Poetry readers, prepare yourselves for a passing of the laurels. The Library of Congress announced in the wee hours Wednesday that the next U.S. poet laureate will be California writer Juan Felipe Herrera. He will be the first Latino poet to be appointed to the position.

“This is a mega-honor for me,” Herrera said in the announcement, “for my family and my parents who came up north before and after the Mexican Revolution of 1910 — the honor is bigger than me.”

A poet of Chicano descent, the 66-year-old Herrera has spent just about his whole life on the West Coast. Born to a family of migrant farm workers, he bounced from tent to trailer for much of his youth in Southern California, eventually going on to study at UCLA and Stanford. Years later, he stepped out of the state to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, before — you guessed it — returning home to California.

Along the way, Herrera has been prolific — so prolific, in fact, that few seem to agree about just how many books the man has written. (Some say 30, others 29, and the Library of Congress says 28; we’ll just put the number at “dozens.”) Those works include poetry collections, novels in verse and plenty of children’s books. Across this body of work, the shadow of California, and his cultural heritage, has loomed large.

“I’ve worked throughout California as a poet; in colleges, universities, worker camps, migrant education offices, continuation high schools, juvenile halls, prisons, and gifted classrooms,” Herrera told the campus newspaper at the University of California, Riverside, where he taught creative writing. “I would say [I’ve been] from San Diego all the way to Arcata and throughout the valleys … for the last 40 years.”

The role of poet-in-chief isn’t entirely new to Herrera. Beyond his teaching duties at UC Riverside, he has been serving as California’s poet laureate since 2012. He’s the first Latino poet to assume that role in the state’s history.

Read more at http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/06/10/412909814/juan-felipe-herrera-named-u-s-poet-laureate

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