Juan Felipe Herrera (born December 27, 1948 Fowler, California) is a poet, performer, writer, cartoonist, teacher, and activist.
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.
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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.
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.[1]
After serving as chair of the Chicano and Latin American Studies Department at California State University, Fresno,[2] in 2005, Herrera joined the Creative Writing Department at University of California, Riverside, as Tomás Rivera Endowed chair,[3] 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.
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.
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.
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.