Lee Herrick

Born in Daejeon, South Korea and adopted at 10 months old, Lee Herrick grew up in California. He is the author of the poetry collections Scar and Flower (2018), Gardening Secrets of the Dead (2012), and This Many Miles from Desire (2007). His poems have appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies, including The Bloomsbury Review, ZYZZYVA, Highway 99: A Literary Journey Through California’s Great Central Valley (2nd edition), One for the Money: The Sentence as Poetic Form, and Indivisible: Poems of Social Justice, among others.

Poet Brian Turner writes that Herrick’s poetry is “Whitman revised ... with a voice that is politically engaged and rooted in compassion. Gardening Secrets of the Dead is a wise, gorgeous book.”

He is coeditor, with Leah Silvieus, of The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (2020).

From 2015 to 2017, Herrick served as poet laureate of Fresno, California. Herrick lives in Fresno and teaches at Fresno City College and in the low-residency MFA Program at Sierra Nevada College.