Juan Felipe Herrera

Juan Felipe Herrera (born on December 27, 1948) is an American poet, performer, writer, cartoonist, teacher, and activist. Herrera was the 21st United States poet laureate from 2015 to 2017. He is a major figure in the literary field of Chicano poetry.

Herrera's experiences as the child of migrant farmers have strongly shaped his work, such as the children's book Calling the Doves, which won the Ezra Jack Keats Book Award in 1997. Community and art have always been part of what has driven Herrera, beginning in the mid-1970s, when he was director of the Centro Cultural de la Raza, an occupied water tank in Balboa Park that had been converted into an arts space for the community.

Herrera’s publications include fourteen collections of poetry, prose, short stories, young adult novels and picture books for children, with twenty-one books in total in the last decade. His 2007 volume 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross the Border: Undocuments 1971-2007 contains texts in both Spanish and English that examine the cultural hybridity that "revolve around questions of identity" on the U.S.-Mexico border. Herrera was awarded the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for Half the World in Light. In 2012, he was appointed California Poet Laureate by Gov. Jerry Brown.

In 2011, Herrera was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2015, Herrera was appointed as the nation's first Chicano or, more broadly, Latino poet laureate.

On June 11, 2016, Herrera was awarded an honorary doctorate from Oregon State University. In August 2022, Juan Felipe Herrera Elementary School opened as part of Fresno Unified School District.

Early life and education Born in 1948 and son of farm workers María de la Luz Quintana and Felipe Emilio Herrera, Juan Felipe Herrera lived from crop to crop and from tractor to trailer to tents on the roads of the San Joaquín Valley and the Salinas Valley. Herrera graduated from San Diego High School in 1967 and received the Educational Opportunity Program scholarship to attend the University of California, Los Angeles where he received his B.A. in Social Anthropology.

Community arts Herrera has received grants to teach poetry, art and performance in several different settings, including community art galleries such as the Galería de la Raza in San Francisco, California, in 1983–85, develop community art and literature broadsides (1977–1978) in San Diego, California, teach poetry in prisons (Soledad Correctional Facility, 1987–88). His current work focuses on working with community colleges and schools in Riverside County and in the Coachella Valley.

After being named California’s Poet Laureate by Governor Jerry Brown in 2012, Herrera created the i-Promise Joanna/Yo te Prometo Joanna Project, an anti-bullying poetry project. Joanna was an elementary school girl who was bullied and killed in an afterschool fight. The first half asks students to send in poems about the effects of bullying. The second half of the project is to take action in preventing bullying. He hopes to collect the poems and publish it as a book in the future.

Awards and fellowships Americas Award 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for Half the World in Light 2009 PEN/Beyond Margins Award 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship Breadloaf Fellowship in Poetry California Arts Council grants (awarded four times) Cooperative Children’s Book Center Choice Focal Award Ezra Jack Keats Award, for Calling the Doves Hungry Mind Award of Distinction Independent Publisher Book Award IRA Teacher’s Choice Latino Hall of Fame Poetry Awards (twice awarded) Los Angeles Times Book Award Nomination National Endowment for the Arts Writers’ Fellowship Awards (twice awarded) New York Public Library Outstanding Book for High School Students Award Pura Belpré Honors Award Smithsonian Children’s Book of the Year Award Stanford Chicano Fellows Fellowship Texas Blue Bonnet Nomination UC Berkeley Regent's Fellowship 2017 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award 2021 Los Angeles Review of Books/UC Riverside Creative Writing Lifetime Achievement Award 2023 Frost Medal 2024 MacArthur Fellow