Juan Felipe Herrera

The son of farmworkers, poet Juan Felipe Herrera was born in Fowler, California, in 1948. He is a graduate of UCLA, Stanford University, and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. 

During the last 50 years, Herrera has dedicated his life to poetry, community, art, and teaching. He served as poet laureate of the United States from 2015 to 2017 and poet laureate of California from 2012 to 2015. He has written more than 30 books in various genres; his recent books of poems are Every Day We Get More Illegal (2020) and Akrílica (2022), a book in translation. Herrera is a recipient of the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. 

One of his inspiration poems, “Sunriders,” was placed in the capsule of the NASA Lucy, an un-crewed, robotic, interplanetary spacecraft launched in the fall of 2021 to explore asteroids and the sun regarding the life-span of Earth. Recently, Herrera’s visual art was featured in the galleries of the Monterey Art Museum in Monterey, California. Currently, he is finishing a poetry collection on the war in Ukraine, Handful of Gravel. The Juan Felipe Herrera Elementary School, where students will learn in both English and Spanish, opened in Fresno, California, in August 2022.

Herrera’s awards and honors include the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Los Angeles Times Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement, the Latino Hall of Fame Award, a Pushcart Prize, a UCR/LARB Lifetime Achievement Award, a Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award, and the UCLA Chancellor’s Medal.

Herrera has taught Chicano and Latin American Studies at California State University, Fresno and creative writing at the University of California, Riverside and has held numerous visiting positions. He is a professor emeritus at the Department of Chicano and Latin American Studies, Fresno State University and is the current coordinator for the Laureate Lab Visual Wordist Studio at the Fresno State Library. 

He lives in Fresno, California, with his wife, the poet Margarita Robles.