A biography for Juan Felipe Herrerahasn’t been written yet.
“I'm very grateful to all the people of Fresno, to Philip Levine and all the poets before me, and all the farmworkers. I didn't get here by myself.”
“My mother was a great storyteller and a great historian in her own way. She only made it to third grade. She came from Mexico City at the tail end of the Mexican Revolution and that kind of turmoil and chaos and frenzy and also excitement.”
“I write while I'm walking, on little scraps of paper. If I have a melody going, I can feel it for days.”
“I'm a political poet - let us say a 'human' poet, a poet that's concerned with the plight of people who suffer. If words can be of assistance, then that's what I'm going to use.”
“Poetry can tell us about what's going on in our lives - not only our personal but our social and political lives.”
“As a boy, I felt ashamed of being Mexican. I'd say I was Hawaiian.”
“My grandmother and my mom and my aunt Aurelia, my grandmother Juanita, my mom Lucia - we lived on the outskirts of a barrio in Mexico City called Tepito, and Tepito for many, many decades was the largest barrio in Mexico and perhaps even Latin America.”
“Just like my parents immigrated from ranch to ranch picking crops, I have migrated from city to city.”
“Perhaps, like the way these leaves spread out and the way they curl in many directions and how they have many features, I think that's how my road has been.”
“Yes, I am the first Latino poet laureate in the United States. But I'm also here for everyone and from everyone. My voice is made by everyone's voices.”
“I gave my voice to poetry.”
“I've worked throughout California as a poet: in colleges, universities, worker camps, migrant education offices, continuation high schools, juvenile halls, prisons, and gifted classrooms.”
“Do not wait for a poem; a poem is too fast for you. Do not wait for the poem; run with the poem and then write the poem.”
“Migrants all over the world are pushed and pulled across borders by hunger, terror and climate change. It happened to my own family.”
“Marvin Bell always looked very closely at how lines could break, how you could put over one line into the second line. How you could stop the line two or three times within the line: You could make it stop.”
“I remember looking at James Joyce's journals. It was just amazing - it looked like ants had written on the page. So much writing on one page, every corner of the page was filled. Some of the lines were underlined in yellow or blue or red. A lot of color, intense writing.”
“We speak about understanding each other, having those conversations nationwide - culturally, historically - and yet there's a lot of gaps. So I want to assist with closing the gap of knowing about and hearing about our Latino communities in terms of literature, in terms of writing.”
“I tell my workshop students, 'I want you to think of yourselves as artists. Then, when you're writing, you're painting, you're crafting, you're making a design, you're sculpting, you're creating choreography, sound, a sound script.'”
“The more we engage in society, the more firsts we have, then there will be a moment when we have no more firsts. Or maybe there will always be new firsts.”
“I know I'm representing the Library of Congress, all the people of the United States and, of course, the Latinos and Latinas as well.”