Juan Felipe Herrera is the United States Poet Laureate. He has won awards from Guggenheim, PEN USA, PEN American Center, the Smithsonian, and the National Book Critics Circle, among others. He lives with his partner, poet and performance artist Margarita Robles, in Fresno, California, and is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Riverside. He grew up in a migrant farmworker family and is the author of some 30 books of poetry, fiction, YA fiction, children's books, and nonfiction.
“Your friends, and your associates, and the people around you, and the environment that you live in, and the speakers around you - the speakers around you - and the communicators around you, are the poetry makers. If your mother tells you stories, she is a poetry maker. If your father says stories, he is a poetry maker. If your grandma tells you stories, she is a poetry maker. And that’s who forms our poetics.”
— Juan Felipe Herrera
CONTRIBUTOR ARTICLES
Where I Used to Walk
A poem by Juan Felipe Herrera in memorium for the officers killed in Baton Rouge...
You Can't Put Muhammad Ali in a Poem
A memorial poem by the Poet Laureate on the passing of Muhammed Ali...
Radio Hour: Mansplaining, Nature Noir, and Obscure Hollywood Novels
Nina Revoyr talks about her new backpacking thriller "Lost Canyon," and LARB senior editor Sarah Mesle explains "mansplaining."...
Hey Phil
An obituary poem for Philip Levine by Juan Felipe Herrera....
And if the man with the choke-hold
And if the man with the choke-hold pulls the standing man down...
Anthropoetry
IN RENATO ROSALDO’s The Day of Shelly’s Death, the inner and outer elements of the poem — that is, the ...
WANDA COLEMAN, 1946-2013
THE POET LAUREATE OF SOUTH CENTRAL, the most extraordinary woman on the Los Angeles poetry scene, is dead, just a week ...
For Jayne Cortez, R.I.P.
It was you .......
Jack Gilbert, 1925 - 2012
...the hard-hooks that fold you down to your knees......
Perched on Nothingness
Image: St. Paul, Minnesota: RNC 2008 (detail) © Joaquín Ramón Herrera Juan Felipe Herrera ...
