U.S. Poet Laureate To Speak In NJ: Juan Felipe Herrera

U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera will appear at a free event at Seton Hall University in South Orange to read from a selection of his bilingual works.

The event is slated for Monday, April 11, at 6 p.m. in the school’s Jubilee Auditorium.

According to a university news release, the son of migrant farm workers, Herrera was appointed the nation’s first Mexican-American Poet Laureate in 2015, also serving as California’s poet laureate from 2012-2014.

“Herrera’s work crosses creative genres, including opera and dance theater, such as 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Borders, which chronicles his involvement with spoken word and street movement performance troupes across the country,” university administrators stated in a release.

"As a Latina I feel very proud that the outstanding and prolific work of this humble Chicano has been recognized by the Library of Congress, making him the first Latino to receive this distinction… I can't wait to listen to his poetry both in English and in Spanish," said Denisse Oller, Executive Director of the Joseph A. Unanue Latino Institute.

Herrera has received fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, the University of California at Berkeley, the Middlebury Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Stanford Chicano Fellows Program, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was educated at UCLA and Stanford University in Social Anthropology and receive his MFA from the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. He has taught at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and served as chair of the Chicano and Latin American Studies Department at CSU-Fresno, recently retiring from the Creative Writing Department at UC Riverside.

This event is being presented in collaboration with the College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Lecture Series, Poetry-in-the-Round, the Department of English, Latin American and Latino/Latina Studies, and the School of Diplomacy and International Relations.

Following the reading and discussion, there will be a book-signing with the author.

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