Featured Author
Juan Felipe Herrera
Juan Felipe Herrera was awarded the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for Half the World in Light. Herrera holds the Tomas Rivera Endowed Chair in Creative Writing where he is a Professor in the Creative Writing Department.
During the last three decades Professor Herrera has received numerous awards and fellowships including various National Endowment for the Arts Writers’ Fellowships, four California Arts Council grants, the UC Berkeley Regent’s Fellowship, the Breadloaf Fellowship in Poetry, and the Stanford Chicano Fellows Fellowship.
With twenty-one books in total, during the past ten years, Professor Herrera’s publications include fourteen collections of poetry, prose, short stories, young adult novels and picture books for children. His literary endeavors have garnered the Ezra Jack Keats Award, the Hungry Mind Award of Distinction, the Americas Award, and the Focal Award. Herrera is also a community arts leadership builder with youth-at-risk and migrant communities, and an actor with appearances on film and stage. The Upside Down Boy, a musical for young audiences based on his book, was well received in New York City in 2004.
Here is an excerpt from his biography at juanfelipe.org
Juan Felipe Herrera is the son of migrant farm workers, Lucha Quintana from El Paso, Texas, and Felipe Emilio Herrera from El Mutato, Chihuahua. During the early fifties he was raised in the small towns, ranches, and worker fields of the San Joaquin Valley. By the time Elvis became famous, his family settled in Logan Heights Barrio in San Diego, and then in San Francisco’s Mission District. After graduating from San Diego High in 1967 where he was active in the choir and studio painting, he became part of the first wave of Chicanos to receive an EOP scholarship to attend UCLA.
Current Books
Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream
Lotería Cards and Fortune Poems: A Book of Lives
Giraffe on Fire Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler
187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross The Border:
Undocuments 1971-2007
Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems
Picture Books for Children
Calling the Doves / El Canto de las Palomas
Grandma and Me at the Flea / Los Meros Meros Remateros
Laughing Out Loud, I Fly / A Carcadjadas Yo Vuelo
The Upside Down Boy / El Niño de Cabeza
Super Cilantro Girl / La Super Niña del Cilantro
Featherless / Desplumado
Children/Young Adult Books
Cinnamon Girl: Letters from Inside a Cereal Box
Downtown Boy
CrashBoomLove
Thunderweavers / Tejadoras de Rayos
