Juan Felipe Herrera

A State of the Union from the nation's first Latino Poet Laureate. Trenchant, compassionate, and filled with hope.

Every Day We Get More Illegal

Juan Felipe Herrera, son of Mexican immigrants, is the new Poet Laureate of the U.S., the nation s first Latino laureate."

Notes on the Assemblage

A buoyant, breathtaking poem from Juan Felipe Herrera — brilliantly illustrated by Caldecott Honoree Lauren Castillo — speaks to every dreaming heart. Have you ever imagined what you might be when you grow up? When he was very young, Juan Felipe Herrera picked chamomile flowers in windy fields and let tadpoles swim across his hands in a creek. He slept outside and learned to say good-bye to his amiguitos each time his family moved to a new town. He went to school and taught himself to read and write English and filled paper pads with rivers of ink as he walked down the street after school. And when he grew up, he became the United States Poet Laureate and read his poems aloud on the steps of the Library of Congress. If he could do all of that . . . what could you do? With this illustrated poem of endless possibility, Juan Felipe Herrera and Lauren Castillo breathe magic into the hopes and dreams of readers searching for their place in life.

Imagine

The author recalls his childhood in the mountains and valleys of California with his farmworker parents who inspired him with poetry and song.

Calling the Doves

In a story written in both English and Spanish, Juanito's family stops their migrant life and settles down so that Juanito can go to school, but Juanito feels out of place with his new way of life until a supportive teacher helps him through his difficult time.

Niño de Cabeza

Herrera provides a fresh and accessible perspective on the crucial human rights issue of immigration through his poetry, prose, and performance. Catch the 187 Express!

Undocuments 1971-2007

187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross The Border

From June of 1958 to June of 1959, Juanito tries to stay out of mischief and be good as he, his mother, and his father move around the state of California, never quite feeling at home.

Downtown Boy

A former United States Poet Laureate shares secrets about viewing the world from a poet's perspective, explaining how "jabberwalking" poets draw inspiration from everything they experience to express themselves in creative ways.

Jabberwalking

“I wish I could find the words to tell you the story of our village after you were killed.” So begins Senegal Taxi, the new work by one of contemporary poetry’s most vibrant voices, Juan Felipe Herrera. Known for his activism and writings that bring attention to oppression and injustice, Herrera turns to stories of genocide and hope in Sudan. Senegal Taxi offers the voices of three children escaping the horrors of war in Africa. Unflinching in its honesty, brutality, and beauty, the collection fiercely addresses conflict and childhood, inviting readers to engage in complex and often challenging issues. Senegal Taxi weaves together verse, dialogue, and visual art created by Herrera specifically for the book. Stylistically genre-leaping, these many layers are part of the collection’s innovation. Phantom-like televisions, mud drawings, witness testimonies, insects, and weaponry are all storytellers that join the siblings for a theatrical crescendo. Each poem is told from a different point of view, which Herrera calls “mud drawings,” referring to the evocative symbols of hope the children create as they hide in a cave on their way to Senegal, where they plan to catch a boat to the United States. This collection signals a poignant shift for Herrera as he continues to use his craft to focus attention on global concerns. In so doing, he offers an acknowledgment that the suffering of some is the suffering of all.

Senegal Taxi

From one of the prominent Chicano poets writing today comes a collection of poems to take your breath away. With dazzling speed and energy, Juan Felipe Herrera sends readers rocketing through verbal space in a celebration of the rhythms and textures of words that will make you want to shout, dance, and read out loud. Lika a wild ride in a fast car, Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream moves at breakneck speed, a post-Lorca journey across the new millennium terrain. Words careen through space and time, through blighted urban landscapes, past banjos and bees, past AIDS faces and mad friars, past severed heads and steel-toed border-crosser boots. To the rhythm of "The Blue Eyed Mambo that Unveils My Lover's Belly" and the sounds of the Last Mayan Acid rock band, Herrera races through the hallucinations of a nation that remains just outside of paradise. With dazzling poems that roar from the darkest corners of our minds toward an ecstatic celebration of the lushness of language, Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream is a celebration of a world that is both sacred and cruel, a world of "Poesy Chicano style undone wild" by one of the most daring poets of our time.

Poems

Border-crosser with a Lamborghini Dream

After his father leaves home, sixteen-year-old Cesar Garcia lives with his mother and struggles through the painful experiences of growing up as a Mexican American high school student.

A Novel in Verse

CrashBoomLove

A buoyant, breathtaking poem from Juan Felipe Herrera -- brilliantly illustrated by Caldecott Honoree Lauren Castillo -- speaks to every dreaming heart. Have you ever imagined what you might be when you grow up? When he was very young, Juan Felipe Herrera picked chamomile flowers in windy fields and let tadpoles swim across his hands in a creek. He slept outside and learned to say good-bye to his amiguitos each time his family moved to a new town. He went to school and taught himself to read and write English and filled paper pads with rivers of ink as he walked down the street after school. And when he grew up, he became the United States Poet Laureate and read his poems aloud on the steps of the Library of Congress. If he could do all of that . . . what could you do? With this illustrated poem of endless possibility, Juan Felipe Herrera and Lauren Castillo breathe magic into the hopes and dreams of readers searching for their place in life.

Some things are close -- cerca. Others are far -- lejos. With sweet simplicity, this charming dual-language board book and its companion volume, Lejos/Far, engage young children. Mi cuarto está cerca de la cocina. My bedroom is close to the kitchen. As she walks from her kitchen through a daisy-filled yard to the house next door, a little girl notices things that are close to each other -- just as the little boy she goes to visit is close to her.

Cerca / Close

Artemio Rodriguez

The gorgeous black and white line art inside this hefty little book instantly caught my eye. These linocut drawings were not the regular loteria images. They were modern adaptations, made with painstaking detail (think of a turn-of-the-millenium...

A Book of Lives

Loteria Cards and Fortune Poems

In a variety of narrative voices, poems, and a play, set at different times in history, the author presents a journey to the Maya Lowlands of Chiapas on a quest for his Indio heritage and a vision of the multicultured identity emerging in America, envisioning the disappearance of borders and evoking a fluid American self that needs no fixed identity or location.

Chicano Poet in the Lowlands of America

Mayan Drifter

In a collection of poetry, prose, journal entries, and even a screenplay, the Chicano poet fixes his gaze on his own life and times, invoking childhoods, neighborhoods, historical revisions, misfits and outcasts.

Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler

Dialogues

The Roots of a Thousand Embraces

Memoria(s) from an Exile's Notebook of the Future

A "fin-de-siecle epic", Juan Felipe Herrera's After the Riots chronicles a ten-and-a-half hour love affair through the streets of Los Angeles, revealing a world marred by chaos and redeemed by beauty. These are wild poems that force us to consider the nature of our modern-day lives, the world around us, and the prospect of love in the shadow of hopelessness.

Juan Felipe Herrera

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