Sunrider: On Juan Felipe Herrera

The former US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera is an artist whose life and work have always been defined by motion. Born in Fowler, California, to a migrant worker couple, Herrera spent his early childhood moving from place to place in the San Joaquin Valley.

The Herreras finally settled in San Diego, California, when Juan Felipe was eight years old, and suddenly he became a “downtown boy.” After graduating from San Diego High School in 1967, he earned his BA from UCLA, and then was admitted into the graduate program in social anthropology at Stanford University. After securing his MA, Herrera was somewhat disenchanted with academia. He abandoned the doctoral program at Stanford and later joined the renowned Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he obtained his MFA in 1990.

Herrera is an extremely prolific author. Beginning with Rebozos of Love (Tolteca Press, 1974), his first and extremely experimental chapbook, the body of work he has amassed now counts thirty-five books and spans all genres: poetry, novel in verse, young adult fiction, and children’s books.

As one of the pioneer artists of the Chicano Movement, Herrera’s early writings were inscribed within the cultural revival of pre-Columbian themes and motifs that defined that epoch, and then moved quickly into a broad exploration of contemporary urban life and social problems. The result has been a unique form of postmodern expressionism that incorporates elements from oral and written traditions, drama, music, and the visual arts. A free spirit committed to human rights and social justice, he has always resisted being labeled as a particular type of poet or constraining his works within any neatly defined genre. Indeed, his compositions defy traditional modes of analysis, and at times even strict classification as poems.

I once asserted that Herrera’s continuous process of maturation and the coherence of his overall poetic project assured him a prominent place in the history of Chicano poetry, and that “a correct appraisal of his contributions is long delayed.” But my early protestations, perhaps premature, have been amply answered over the years. The accolades Herrera has received to date are too many to list here. For me, the climactic moment came in 2015 when Herrera, after having served as poet laureate of California from 2012 to 2015, was appointed as US poet laureate from 2015 to 2017—the first Chicano and the first Latino to occupy these posts. One of his poems, “Sunriders,” which I was honored to translate, was included in the capsule of Lucy, the interplanetary spacecraft launched by NASA in October of 2021. A gentle, humble, and generous soul, Juan Felipe Herrera has always been in the vanguard of contemporary US poetry.