Javier O. Huerta

Mexican American poet Javier O. Huerta was born in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, Mexico, and immigrated to Houston, Texas, in 1981. He is a graduate of the bilingual MFA program at the University of Texas at El Paso. Huerta’s debut collection, Some Clarifications y otros poemas (2007), received the 31st Chicano/Latino Literary Prize from the University of California, Irvine. He also authored American Copia: An Immigrant Epic (2012). The immigration and bicultural experience is essential to his work; the first line of his debut collection, “Today I’m going to the grocery store,” is the sentence Huerta was given to write during his naturalization interview to become a US citizen. On writing for a bilingual audience, Huerta says, “The bilingual pun, I believe, is central to the tradition of Chicano poetry. … I like to think that the Chicano bilingual pun is not simply a result of poetic wit. I like to think that it is a result of everyday misunderstandings, misreadings, mistranslations, and mispronunciations.”

Huerta teaches and is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studies poetry of the 19th century.