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
came chaos city frenzy great historian mexican mexico tail third turmoil
My mother was a great storyteller and a great historian in her own way. She only made it to third grade. She came from Mexico City at the tail end of the Mexican Revolution and that kind of turmoil and chaos and frenzy and also excitement.
melody
I write while I'm walking, on little scraps of paper. If I have a melody going, I can feel it for days.
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.'
picking
Just like my parents immigrated from ranch to ranch picking crops, I have migrated from city to city.
cleaned houses loved poetry texas
My mother was a washerwoman - or a woman that cleaned houses in Texas... in Plano, Texas - who always loved poetry and always loved stories.
facts history moved ranch stories town valley
My parents moved from ranch to ranch, valley to valley, town to town, but our roots in Fowler never really faded. For me, it's a place of history, stories and songs, not just facts and figures.
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.
moved oral traditions
What I really had was stories, the oral traditions of my parents. We moved so much that that was really our encyclopedia. A dream world told to me from my parents in the living room.
definitely
I am representing California, and all of California, definitely as a Mexicano, a Chicano, a Latino.
bit grade hit learning second spoke third time
First grade was - I spoke only Spanish, and second grade - probably a bit more English. And by the time I hit third grade, I was learning, of course, much, much more English.
assist gap hearing knowing latino terms understanding
We speak about understanding each other, having those conversations nationwide - culturally, historically - and yet there's a lot of gaps. So I want to assist with closing the gap of knowing about and hearing about our Latino communities in terms of literature, in terms of writing.
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.
decades largest latin lived mexico mom perhaps
My grandmother and my mom and my aunt Aurelia, my grandmother Juanita, my mom Lucia - we lived on the outskirts of a barrio in Mexico City called Tepito, and Tepito for many, many decades was the largest barrio in Mexico and perhaps even Latin America.
poetry
Poetry is a call to action, and it also is action.