Juan Felipe Herrera
Juan Felipe Herrera
Juan Felipe Herrerais a poet, performer, writer, cartoonist, teacher, and activist. Herrera has been the United States Poet Laureate since 2015...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth27 December 1948
CountryUnited States of America
curl directions leaves road spread
Perhaps, like the way these leaves spread out and the way they curl in many directions and how they have many features, I think that's how my road has been.
crop field fort
We went from crop to crop, field to field. And my father had that army truck, a 1940s army truck from Fort Bliss, El Paso.
education gifted high juvenile throughout worked worker
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.
continue diego drink fountain grade high poetry san shaped teachers third visual
San Diego shaped me a lot. The visual landscapes, the emotional panoramas, the teachers and mentors I had from the third grade through San Diego High - it's all a big part of the poetry fountain that I continue to drink from.
asking corner diego half hip people poems san sticking
I used to stand on the corner in San Diego with poems sticking out of my hip pocket, asking people if there was a place where I could read poems. The audience is half of the poem.
spanish verbs
Sometimes you can do things with Spanish - like verbs and genders - easier than you can in English.
change poem solar spanish totally versus
Sometimes it's like that. I go, 'You know what? I'm going to just change scales. I'm going to even change instruments. And I'm going to go into the chromatics of the Spanish language,' and I do. You know, the poem is totally different. It's like a lunar voice versus a day voice, a solar voice.
becoming beings complete diversity human learn means missing
Diversity really means becoming complete as human beings - all of us. We learn from each other. If you're missing on that stage, we learn less. We all need to be on that stage.
across borders change climate family happened pulled pushed terror
Migrants all over the world are pushed and pulled across borders by hunger, terror and climate change. It happened to my own family.
bell closely looked second stop
Marvin Bell always looked very closely at how lines could break, how you could put over one line into the second line. How you could stop the line two or three times within the line: You could make it stop.
creating design sound workshop yourselves
I tell my workshop students, 'I want you to think of yourselves as artists. Then, when you're writing, you're painting, you're crafting, you're making a design, you're sculpting, you're creating choreography, sound, a sound script.'
definitely
I am representing California, and all of California, definitely as a Mexicano, a Chicano, a Latino.
poetry
Poetry is a call to action, and it also is action.
lives poetry social
Poetry can tell us about what's going on in our lives - not only our personal but our social and political lives.