JUAN FELIPE HERRERA TO READ AS PART OF SUMMER ARTS

Poets are prominent at this year’s edition of Summer Arts, but the most prominent may be Juan Felipe Herrera, newly named U.S. poet laureate.

In June, the Library of Congress made him the 21st person to hold that title.When he starts his tenure in September, he’ll be the first Chicano poet laureate, writing and speaking in English and Spanish.

Herrera will read at the World Theater at 7 p.m., July 21. Tickets are $15 and can be reserved by calling the Summer Arts box office at 262-2714 or purchased at the door.

He’s also one of the instructors for Poet’s Metamorphosis: From Page to Stage to Screen, one of 17 classes held on campus during July as Summer Arts returns to CSUMB for the fourth year.

The son of migrant farm workers, Herrera earned an undergraduate degree at UCLA, a master’s degree in social anthropology at Stanford, and a master of fine arts in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

He works in many forms: litanies, protest poems, plays, sonnets, books for children and young adults, works that combine verse and other forms.

“He doesn’t stop to explain things so people who aren’t Latino will understand them; he just does what he does. And trusts, correctly I think, that the language and the emotional trajectories of the characters or the bits of narratives in the poems will fascinate you enough that if you’re interested and you don’t get the references, then you can look them up,” Stephen Burt, professor of English at Harvard, told the L.A. Times.

In a 2004 interview at CSU Fresno, Herrera noted the influences of three distinct Californias – the small agricultural towns of the San Joaquin Valley he knew as a child, San Diego’s Logan Heights, and San Francisco’s Mission District – on his work: “all these landscapes became stories, and all those languages became voices in my writing, all those visuals became colors and shapes, which made me more human and gave me a wide panorama to work from.”

His numerous poetry collections include Senegal Taxi; 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border: Undocuments 1971-2007; Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems; Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream and Crashboomlove, a novel in verse.

Herrera, who lives in Fresno, recently retired from UC Riverside where he taught creative writing for a decade. He just ended a two-year term as California’s poet laureate.

Listen to an interview on NPR