North Park to Host U.S. Poet Laureate
Juan Felipe Herrera on campus November 12–13 for event series
CHICAGO (November 9, 2015) — Juan Felipe Herrera spent his early childhood living in the tents and trailers that dotted the fields of Southern California’s farmland. The son of Mexican migrant farmworkers, Herrera would move with his family as the seasons and crops changed. Those years instilled in him a passion for fairness and justice, and a desire to tell the story of the migrant and indigenous experiences. Herrera was honored for how he has told that story when he was inaugurated as the first Mexican-American U.S. poet laureate on September 15.
North Park University will host Herrera on November 12 and 13 for a series of on-campus events, connected to this year’s Campus Theme program, What Is Truth? “It is an honor to have the poet laureate here,” said Dr. Karl Clifton-Soderstrom, associate professor of philosophy and the director of the Campus Theme program. “It’s a tremendous opportunity for our students to encounter a preeminent artist of our time. Mr. Herrera also shares with our campus a commitment to social justice, which shows up both through his artistic voice and in his own advocacy work.”
Prior to his inauguration, Herrera served as California State poet laureate, from 2012 to 2014. He is the author of many collections of poetry, novels, and children’s books, and the recipient of several prestigious literary awards and fellowships. Although Herrera recently retired as a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, his work as an artist and activist continues.
“Poetry is a call to action and it also is action,” Herrera told NPR in an interview just before his inauguration. “Sometimes we say, ‘This tragedy, it happened far away. I don't know what to do. I'm concerned but I'm just dangling in space.’ A poem can lead you through that, and it is made of action because you're giving your whole life to it in that moment. And then the poem—you give it to everyone. Not that we're going to change somebody's mind—no, we're going to change that small, three-minute moment. And someone will listen. That's the best we can do.”
On Thursday evening, Herrera will give a reading, followed by a discussion and book signing, in Isaacson Chapel at 7:00 pm. On Friday morning, he will deliver a lecture, “Truth-Telling and the Role of the Artist in Society,” in Anderson Chapel at 10:30 am. Herrera will also lead a private writing workshop for creative writing students on Friday afternoon.
“We have designed two events that each serves a different purpose,” said Clifton-Soderstrom. “Together, they allow us to interact with both aspects of his work. Both should be wonderful.”
The University’s Campus Theme program offers a yearlong series of events, lectures, and discussions across campus around a central question of the human experience. When the program committee decided on the theme of What Is Truth?, members felt that Herrera was an obvious fit. “There are a host of truths that Mr. Herrera’s work confronts us with,” Clifton-Soderstrom said.
Throughout human history, he offered, debates have raged about whether art reveals or distorts the truth. But alongside the skepticism and scorn that artists have often historically faced, “there is also a tradition that claims the artists in society are the prophets, the seers, the diviners of the truths that reason, logic, and science cannot see,” Clifton-Soderstrom said. “Most notably, we might say that Mr. Herrera’s work confronts us with the truth, lies, revelations, and deceptions around the topics of cultural identity, geographical migration, and our own relationship to the land.”
Herrera plans to use his role as poet laureate as a platform for examining truth through storytelling. “I’m here to encourage others to speak,” he told the Washington Post earlier this year. “To speak out and speak up and write with their voices and their family stories and their sense of humor and their deep concerns and their way of speaking their own languages. I want to encourage people to do that with this amazing medium called poetry.”
Herrera’s two campus events are free and open to the public. Location details are available online.