Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate

Newly appointed Poet Laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera was born in Fowler, California, on December 27, 1948. The son of migrant farmers, Herrera lived in trailers or tents along the roads of California's San Joaquin Valley. 

A graduate of San Diego High in 1967, Herrera received an Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) scholarship to attend UCLA. He earned a BA in social anthropology. Immersed in the Chicano Civil Rights Movement, he began performing in experimental theater.

Herrera received a masters degree in social anthropology from Stanford in 1980. He studied for his MFA at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1990.

Herrera's 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. His work includes video, photography, theater, poetry, prose, and performance.

Intense surrealism flowed through his earliest work.  He said, "I wanted to fly with symbols and metaphors and see trees in the shape of flying saucers." Allen Ginsberg showed him he could provide both reality and illusion.

An interview of Herrera's art of poetry: http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-poet-laureate-juan-felipe-herrera-the-art-of-poetry-20150610-story.html

Here and There 

I sit and meditate—my dog licks her paws

on the red-brown sofa

so many things somehow

it all is reduced to numbers letters figures

without faces or names only jagged lines

across the miles half-shadows

going into shadow-shadow then destruction   the infinite light

here and there            cannot be overcome

it is the first drop of ink