Sunday, April 28, 1 – 3 p.m. Sacramento City College Performing Arts Center
US Poet Laureate Emeritus Juan Felipe Herrera:
The Power of the Word: An Intergenerational Conversation
A Reading & Conversation with Maceo Montoya & Terezita Romo
The keynote event for the Literary Festival features Juan Felipe Herrera, supported by Maceo Montoya, Poet, Publisher, UCD Professor, moderated by Art Historian, Curator, and Professor Terezita Romo.
Juan Felipe Herrera has dedicated his life to poetry, community, art, and teaching. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2015 to 2017 and of California from 2012 to 2015. He has written more than 30 books in various genres. Herrera is a recipient of the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. His poem “SunRiders” was placed in the capsule of NASA Lucy in 2021. His awards include the Robert Frost Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Los Angeles Times Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement, the Latino Hall of Fame Award, a Pushcart Prize, a UCR/LARB Lifetime Achievement Award, a Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award, and the UCLA Chancellor’s Medal. His books include Rebozos of Love, Exiles of Desire. The Roots of a Thousand Embraces: Dialogues. Loteria Cards & Fortune Poems. Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler. Cinnamon Girl: Letters Found Inside a Cereal Box. Half the World in Light, Notes on the Assemblage, and Every Day We Get More Illegal, among many others.
The son of farmworkers, Herrera was recently honored by having the bilingual Juan Felipe Herrera Elementary School in Fresno named for him. He is a graduate of UCLA, Stanford University, and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Recently, Herrera’s visual art was featured in the galleries of the Monterey Art Museum in Monterey, California. Currently, he is finishing a poetry collection on the war in Ukraine, Handful of Gravel. Herrera has taught Chicano and Latin American Studies at California State University, Fresno and creative writing at the University of California, Riverside and has held numerous visiting positions. He is a professor emeritus at the Department of Chicano and Latin American Studies, Fresno State University and is the current coordinator for the Laureate Lab Visual Wordist Studio at the Fresno State Library. He lives in Fresno, California, with his wife, the poet Margarita Robles.
Maceo Montoya is a California-based author, artist, and educator. His first novel, The Scoundrel and the Optimist (Bilingual Review, 2010), was awarded the 2011 International Latino Book Award for “Best First Book.” In 2014, University of New Mexico Press published his second novel, The Deportation of Wopper Barraza, and Copilot Press published Letters to the Poet from His Brother, a hybrid book combining images, prose poems, and essays. Montoya’s third work of fiction, You Must Fight Them: A Novella and Stories (University of New Mexico Press, 2015) was a finalist for Foreword Review’s INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award. Montoya is also the author and illustrator of Chicano Movement for Beginners, a work of graphic nonfiction. His most recent novel is Preparatory Notes for Future Masterpieces (University of Nevada Press, 2021). The Yale graduate’s paintings, drawings, and prints have been featured in exhibitions and publications throughout the country as well as internationally, and he has collaborated with numerous writers on visual-textual projects with other writers. He is a professor at UC Davis in Chicana/o Studies, teaching courses on Chicanx culture and literature, and in the English department’s MFA Creative Writing Program. Since 2022, he has served as the editor of the literary magazine Huizache.
Terezita “Tere” Romo is a Lecturer and Affiliate Faculty in the Chicana/o Studies Department at UC, Davis. An art historian, she has published extensively on Chicana/o artists and art, most recently as a contributor to the Smithsonian American Art Museum exhibition catalog, ¡Printing the Revolution!: The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now. She has served as the chief curator at the Mexican Museum in San Francisco and the Arts Project Director at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago as well as Arts Programs Director and Research Associate at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. As an independent curator, Terezita has organized numerous exhibitions, including “Art Along the Hyphen: The Mexican American Generation” at the Autry National Museum in Los Angeles and “Reframing Comunidad: The Art of Ester Hernandez and Shizu Saldamando” at the National Museum of Mexican Art. She is the co-curator of “Traitor, Survivor, Icon: The Legacy of La Malinche.”
Reposted From the Sacramento Poetry Center.
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