Juan Felipe Herrera

Juan Felipe Herrera is a poet, performer, and activist whose work explores identity, migration, social justice, and the expansive possibilities of language. The son of Mexican farmworkers, he has drawn on bilingual and bicultural experiences across a prolific body of work that includes poetry, prose, children’s books, and theatrical performance. His poetry often fuses spoken word, song, and visual elements to reflect the lives and struggles of marginalized communities in the United States and Latin America.

Herrera served as the twenty-first Poet Laureate of the United States from 2015 to 2017—the first Latino to hold the post—and as California Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2015. He is the author of numerous collections, including Every Day We Get More Illegal, Notes on the Assemblage, and Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. A graduate of UCLA, Stanford, and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Herrera is also a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.