How fitting that Juan Felipe Herrera’s tenure as 2015 United States Poet Laureate continues in an election year filled with divisive rhetoric. Instead of putting up walls around a Mexican culture, Herrera tears them down with words and invites everyone to step inside.
Herrera, the nation’s first Chicano Poet Laureate, will give a reading after a public reception at the Central Library May 27. His appearance kicks off The Writers Place’s series honoring the late William H. Hickok, who founded the local writer’s group with his wife, Gloria Vando Hickok in 1992.
This will be the second time The Writers Place has sponsored a U.S. Poet Laureate, having brought Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky to Kansas City in 1998. Because Herrera is in such demand, it was challenging confirming a date, says Executive Director Elizabeth Fischer.
“We were fortunate that the president of our board of directors, José Faus, who is also a local artist and writer, knows Mr. Herrera personally, as well as Norma Cantu, a professor of Latino studies at UMKC,” says Fischer. Fischer thinks Herrera’s visit was also influenced by Kansas City’s active community of Latino writers, exemplified by the Latino Writers Collective.
In a 2015 CBS news interview, Herrera, 66, said, “You know, 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. And I want our young Latinos and Latinas to write their hearts out and express their hearts out and let us all listen to each other.”
Herrera calls himself a political poet and a human poet, a poet who’s concerned with the plight of people who suffer. “If words can be of assistance, then that’s what I’m going to use,” he has said.
A son of Mexican migrant workers raised in the San Joaquin Valley of California, Herrera creates vivid descriptions of his Chicano and North American roots through his writings, performance art and art. A graduate of UCLA, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Stanford University, he has written 30 books (so far) in various genres. An artist and photographer, Herrera is a professor of creative writing at UC Riverside. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN USA Award.
In his book, Notes on the Assemblage, Herrera writes of the experience of migrants who have languished in detention camps and feel apprehensive as they approach the U.S. border. In his 2014 book, Portraits of Hispanic American Heroes, he shares the lives of remarkable Latinos and Latinas from all walks of life, from the United States Supreme Court to academia to Hollywood to California’s farms.
Every U.S. Poet Laureate dedicates his or her year to a special project raising the national consciousness of poetry. Herrera is dedicating his Laureate project to developing a website welcoming anyone’s creative musings on topical subjects of home and country. Herrera will select some of those contributions to be part of an “epic poem” for the Library of Congress.
Above: U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera will give a reading at the Central Library on May 27. Photo by Carlos Puma, for UC Riverside.
Special funding for the 2016 William H. Hickok Series has been provided by the Richard J. Stern Foundation for the Arts, Ramon Murguia, Kansas City Southern, and Gloria Vando Hickok on behalf of the N.W. Dible Foundation. Reservations are required for the poetry reading at 6 p.m. May 27 at the Central Library. Make reservations and learn about related activities that week at www.writersplace.org.
