Juan Felipe Herrera



Juan Felipe Herrera (born December 27, 1948) is an American poet, performer, writer, cartoonist, teacher, and activist.

Life
Juan Felipe Herrera was born in Fowler, Califotnia, the only son of María de la Luz (Lucha) Quintana and Felipe Emilio Herrera. The three were campesinos living from crop to crop, and from tractor to trailer to tents on the roads of the San Joaquín Valley, Southern California and the Salinas Valley. Herrera's experiences as the child of migrant farmers have strongly shaped his work, such as the children's book Calling the Doves, which won the Ezra Jack Keats Book Award in 1997. Community and art has always been part of what has driven Herrera, beginning in the mid-seventies, when he was director of the Centro Cultural de la Raza, an occupied water tank in Balboa Park that had been converted into an arts space for the community.

Herrera’s publications include fourteen collections of poetry, prose, short stories, young adult novels and picture books for children with twenty-one books in total in the last decade. Herrera was awarded the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for Half the World in Light.

Family
Juan Felipe Herrera lives with his partner, Margarita Robles, a poet and performance artist, in Redlands, California. His children and grandchildren live in California, Oregon and New York. The author and artist Joaquín Ramón Herrera is his son.

Education
Herrera received his B.A. in Social Anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles, his Masters in Social Anthropology from Stanford University, and his Masters in Fine Arts, in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa.

Teaching
After serving as chair of the Chicano and Latin American Studies Department at California State University, Fresno, in 2005, Herrera joined the Creative Writing Department at University of California, Riverside, as Tomás Rivera Endowed chair, and director of the Art and Barbara Culver Center for the Arts, a new multimedia space in downtown Riverside. He was a teaching fellow with the distinction of Excellence at the University of Iowa, Writers Workshop in 1990.

Community Arts
Juan Felipe has received grants to teach poetry, art and performance in several different settings, including community art galleries such as the Galería de la Raza in San Francisco, California, in 1983-85, develop community art and literature broadsides (1977–78) in San Diego, California, teach poetry in prisons (Soledad Correctional Facility, 1987–88). His current work focuses on working with community colleges and schools in the Riverside country and in Coachella Valley.

Awards

 * Ezra Jack Keats Award, for Calling the Doves
 * Hungry Mind Award of Distinction
 * Americas Award
 * Focal Award
 * Pura Belpré Honors Award
 * Smithsonian Children’s Book of the Year Award
 * Cooperative Children’s Book Center Choice
 * IRA Teacher’s Choice
 * LA Times Book Award Nomination
 * Texas Blue Bonnet Nomination
 * New York Public Library Outstanding Book for High School Students Award
 * two Latino Hall of Fame Poetry Awards
 * two National Endowment for the Arts Writers’ Fellowship Awards
 * four California Arts Council grants
 * UC Berkeley Regent’s Fellowship
 * Breadloaf Fellowship in Poetry
 * Stanford Chicano Fellows Fellowship
 * 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for Half the World in Light
 * 2009 PEN/Beyond Margins Award
 * 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship

Publications

 * Rebozos of Love. Tolteca Publications. 1974.
 * Exiles of Desire. Arte Publico Press. University of Houston. 1985.
 * Facegames. Dragon Cloud Press. 1987.
 * Akrílica. Alcatraz Editions. 1989.
 * Memoria(s) from an Exile's Notebook of the Future. Santa Monica College Press. 1993. [Poetry Chapbook]
 * The Roots of a Thousand Embraces: Dialogues. Manic D. Press. San Francisco. 1994.
 * Night Train to Tuxtla: New Stories and Poems. University of Arizona. 1994.
 * [Bilingual children's story]. Fall 1995
 * Love After the Riots. Curbstone Press. Willimantic, NY. 1996
 * Mayan Drifter: Chicano Poet in the Lowlands of America. Temple University Press. Philadelphia, Pa. Spring 1997.
 * Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream. University of Arizona Press. 1999.
 * Loteria Cards & Fortune Poems. City Lights Publishers. SF. Fall, 1999.
 * The Upside Down Boy/El Nino de Cabeza. Children's Book Press, SF. 2000.
 * Thunderweavers. University of Az. Tucson. 2000.
 * Giraffe on Fire. Poems. Univ. Az. Press. Tucson. 2001.
 * Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. 2002.
 * Coralito's Bay / La Bahia de Coralito. Monterey National Marine Sanctuary. Monterey. 2004
 * Cinnamon Girl: Letters Found Inside a Cereal Box. Harper Collins, Joanna Cotler Books /Tempest. New York. 2005. ISBN 9780060579845
 * Downtown Boy. Scholastic Press. Scholastic. New York. 2005.
 * 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross The Border, City Lights, 2007, ISBN 9780872864627
 * Undocuments 1971-2007. City Lights Publishers. San Francisco. 2007.
 * Half the World in Light. University of Arizona Press. 2008.
 * 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross The Border, City Lights, 2007, ISBN 9780872864627
 * Undocuments 1971-2007. City Lights Publishers. San Francisco. 2007.
 * Half the World in Light. University of Arizona Press. 2008.

Film and Stage
Herrera produced “The Twin Tower Songs,” a San Joaquin Valley performance memorial on the September 11, 2001 attacks and writes (poetry sequences) for the PBS television series “American Family.” His recent musical, The Upside Down Boy, was well received in New York City, produced by Making Books Sing, libretto by Barbara Zinn Krieger. Lyrics by Juan Felipe Herrera and Music by Cristian Amigo. Mr. Herrera is a board member of the Before Columbus American Book Awards Foundation and the California Council for the Humanities.

Theater
Juan Felipe Herrera founded a number of performance ensemble during the last three decades: Teatro Tolteca (UCLA, 1971 – a choreopoem theatre utilizing jazz, spoken-word and movement), TROKA ( Bay Area, 1983, a percussion/spoken word ensemble, Teatro Zapata, (Fresno, Ca., 1990 – a student community theatre), Manikrudo: Raw Essence ( Fresno, Ca., 1993, a culturally diverse, performance art ensemble and workshop), Teatro Ambulante de Salud/The Traveling Health Theatre (2003, Fresno, Ca. for migrant communities in the San Joaquin Valley) and Verbal Coliseum – A Spoken Word Ensemble (UC Riverside, 2006), “Prison Journal,” an experimental play was featured at the Univ. of Iowa Playwright’s Festival, 1990. Latin@ Theatre/Movement & Improv training: Luis Valdez/Teatro Campesino, Enrique Buenaventura, Rodrigo Duarte-Clark, Olivia Chumacero, Jorge Huerta, James Donlon.