Herrera, Juan Felipe (1948-…), served as poet laureate of the United States from 2015 to 2017. Herrera became the first Chicano poet to receive the appointment. A Chicano is a person of Mexican descent who was born in the United States or who identifies with that group. Since the later 1900’s, Herrera has been a leading voice in exploring the Mexican American experience in the United States. In addition to his adult and children’s poetry, Herrera’s work includes video, photography, theater, and performance pieces.
Herrera has lived almost his entire life in California, and his writings are strongly influenced by his experiences growing up in the state as a Chicano. He published his first book of poetry, Rebozos of Love, in 1974. Herrera’s other major books include the memoir Mayan Drifter: Chicano Poet in the Lowlands of America (1997), and the poetry collections Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream (1999), Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems (2008), Senegal Taxi (2013), Notes on the Assemblage (2015), and Every Day We Get More Illegal (2020). CrashBoomLove (1999) is a novel in verse.
Herrera has written several children’s books, including the autobiographical The Upside Down Boy (2000) and Imagine (2018), and Portraits of Hispanic American Heroes (2014). In Jabberwalking (2018), he helps young readers discover how inspiration from everyday life can become poetry. The board book Lejos = Far and its companion book, Cerca = Close (both 2019), contain short parallel sentences in English and Spanish.
Herrera was born in Fowler, California, on Dec. 27, 1948, the son of migrant farmworkers. In 1972, he received a B.A. degree in social anthropology from the University of California at Los Angeles. He received an M.A. degree in anthropology from Stanford University in 1980 and an M.F.A. degree from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1990. Herrera was a professor of Chicano and Latin American Studies at California State University, Fresno, from 1990 to 2004. In 2005, he joined the creative writing department at the University of California at Riverside. Herrera retired in 2015.
