U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera: 'The audience is half of the poem'

[n2doc]

Walking past a row of books in a library, 21-year-old aspiring poet Juan Felipe Herrera was stopped short by a title: "Snaps." The book was the debut collection by Victor Hernandez Cruz.

"I opened it up, started reading those poems," Herrera recalls 45 years later. "Puerto Rican bilingual English style and language and voices. The wordplay, improvisation, it was amazing. That catapulted me. I never forgot it." In 2012 he found himself sitting with Cruz as chancellors of the Academy of American Poets in New York City.

Now he's joining an even more prestigious club: On Wednesday, the Library of Congress named him U.S. poet laureate. When he begins his tenure in September, he'll be the first-ever Chicano poet laureate, writing and speaking in both English and Spanish.

Herrera's parents, both migrant farmworkers, came to California from Mexico in the early part of the 20th century. He traveled up and down the state as a child and attended UCLA with the help of the Educational Opportunity Program for disadvantaged students. Although he got a master's degree at Stanford in the 1970s in social anthropology, what he really wanted to do was write. In 1988 he went to the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop for a master of fine arts in poetry.

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http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-poet-laureate-herrera-20150610-story.html

[Bluenorthwest]

1. 'Five Directions To My House'-Juan Felipe Herrera