Juan Felipe Herrera Appointed California Poet Laureate

Posted on March 26, 2012

Juan Felipe Herrera has been appointed California Poet Laureate by Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. Herrera is the author of twenty-eight books and currently serves as the Tomas Rivera Endowed Chair in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.

The son of migrant workers from Mexico, Mr. Herrera earned a Bachelor's Degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, a Master of Arts in Social Anthropology from Stanford University and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa. He was elected to the Board of Chancellors for the Academy of American Poets in 2011 and he was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry in 2010. Herrera's collection, Half of the World in Light, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry in 2009.