Blog by Moises Huerta
Thanks David for the beautiful blog you entered previously on the celebration of Juan Felipe Herrera being selected as 2015 Poet Laureate. Well done. I was there and I witnessed a love fest. This gentle, childlike poet reached the many who attended this well-deserved tribute. Here is a list of some of his many accomplishments.
Juan Felipe Herrera was born in Fowler, California, on December 27,
1948. The son of migrant farm workers, Herrera moved often, living in
trailers or tents along the roads of the San Joaquin Valley in Southern
California. As a child, he attended school in a variety of small towns
from San Francisco to San Diego. He began drawing cartoons while in
middle school, and by high school was playing folk music by Bob Dylan
and Woody Guthrie.
Herrera graduated from San Diego High in 1967,
and was one of the first wave of Chicanos to receive an Educational
Opportunity Program (EOP) scholarship to attend UCLA. There, he became
immersed in the Chicano Civil Rights Movement, and began performing in
experimental theater, influenced by Allen Ginsberg and Luis Valdez.
In
1972, Herrera received a BA in Social Anthropology from UCLA. He
received a masters in Social Anthropology from Stanford in 1980, and
went on to earn an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in
1990.
His interests in indigenous cultures inspired him to lead a
formal Chicano trek to Mexican Indian villages, from the rain forest of
Chiapas to the mountains of Nayarit. The experience greatly changed him
as an artist. His work, which includes video, photography, theater,
poetry, prose, and performance, has made Herrera a leading voice on the
Mexican American and indigenous experience.
Herrera is the author of many collections of poetry, including
Senegal Taxi (University of Arizona Press, 2013);
Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems (University of Arizona Press, 2008), a recipient of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award;
187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross The Border: Undocuments 1971–2007 (City Lights, 2007); and
Crashboomlove (University of New Mexico Press, 1999), a novel in verse, which received the Americas Award.
His books of prose for children include:
Portraits of Hispanic American Heroes (Dial Books, 2014);
SkateFate (Rayo, 2011)
Calling The Doves (Children’s Book, 2001);
Upside Down Boy (2006), which was adapted into a musical in New York City; and
Cinnamon Girl: Letters Found Inside a Cereal Box (HarperCollins, 2005), which tells the tragedy of 9/11 through the eyes of a young Puerto Rican girl.
Ilan
Stavans, the Mexican American essayist, has said: “There is one
constant over the past three decades in Chicano literature and his name
is Juan Felipe Herrera. Aesthetically, he leaps over so many canons that
he winds up on the outer limits of urban song. And spiritually, he is
deep into the quest that we all must begin before it is too late.”
In a profile of Herrera in
The New York Times,
Stephen Burt wrote: “Many poets since the 1960s have dreamed of a new
hybrid art, part oral, part written, part English, part something else:
an art grounded in ethnic identity, fueled by collective pride, yet
irreducibly individual too. Many poets have tried to create such an art:
Herrera is one of the first to succeed.”
Herrera has received
fellowships and grants from the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, the
California Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, the
Stanford Chicano Fellows Program, and the University of California at
Berkeley.
Over the past three decades, he has founded a number of
performance ensembles, and has taught poetry, art, and performance in
community art galleries and correctional facilities. He has taught at
the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and served as chair of the
Chicano and Latin American Studies Department at CSU-Fresno.
Herrera
currently holds the Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair in the Creative Writing
Department at UC Riverside. He is also director of the Art and Barbara
Culver Center for the Arts, a new multimedia space in downtown
Riverside, California. He was elected a
Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2011. In 2015, Herrera was named Poet Laureate of the United States.
He
is the father of five children, and lives in Fresno, California, with
his partner, the poet and performance artist, Margarita Robles.
Some of the content of this blog was attained courtesy of poets.org.
