Former Fresno State professor Juan Felipe Herrera was appointed California poet laureate by Gov. Brown. The state Senate must confirm the gover-nor’s appointment before Her-rera can begin a two-year term.
He is the second former Fresno State professor to earn a high literary honor in the past year. Phillip Levine, professor emeritus of English, is poet laureate of the United States, appointed by the Library of Congress in August.
Two Fresno State alumni are past state poets laureate – Greg Pape (Montana) and Lawson Iwada (Oregon).
Herrera, 63, was chair of Fresno State’s Chicano and Latin American Department from 1990 to 2004 before going to the University of California, Riverside where he is the Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair in the Department of Creative Writing.
He has published more than two-dozen volumes of poetry, prose, plays, children’s books and young-adult novels. Herrera has won more than 50 awards, fellowships and honorable mentions.
Dr. Victor Torres, current chair of Fresno State’s Chicano and Latin American Studies department, said he is extremely proud of and happy for Herrera, who worked with him, was a mentor and whom Torres succeeded.
“Juan Felipe deserves all the accolades that come his way,” Torres said. “He was the department’s most popular professor because of his uncanny ability to nurture and expose the creativity within his students – creativity the students themselves did not think they possessed.”
The son of migrant workers from Mexico, Herrera was reared in Fowler. He earned a bachelor’s degree rom the University of California, Los Angeles, a master’s from Stanford University, both in social anthropology, and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa where he also was a teaching assistant fellow at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop (1988-90).
