[Crwt-undergrad-info] Juan Felipe Herrera wins Frost Award

[Tom Lutz]

from Allison Adelle Hedge Coke:

Our beloved Emeritus Rivera Chair, 2022-2023 UCR Dickson Professor, CA Poet
Laureate, US Poet Laureate, from farmworker family poet/musician/performer
Juan Felipe Herrera, a 2023 Writers Week author, has been honored with
the Frost
Medalist, Poetry Society
<https://poetrysociety.org/about/news/2023-frost-medalist>

Juan Felipe Herrera will be appearing at Writer's Week today at 4:00
pm, live on campus and at https://www.crowdcast.io/c/ww2023.

The official announcement:

The Poetry Society of America is pleased to announce that *Juan Felipe
Herrera *is the 2023 recipient of the Frost Medal for distinguished
lifetime achievement in poetry. Named for Robert Frost, and first given in
1930, the Frost Medal is one of the oldest and most prestigious awards in
American poetry and is awarded annually at the discretion of the PSA's
Board of Governors. Previous winners of the award include Wallace Stevens,
Marianne Moore, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, John
Ashbery, Lucille Clifton, N. Scott Momaday, and most recently Sharon Olds.

*The Frost Medal citation from the Poetry Society of America’s Board of
Governors reads:*

Juan Felipe Herrera does not write poems so much as inhabit them. “Poetry
is where I live,” he writes, and he lives with a remarkable vibrancy,
generosity, and compassion. His poems move as he moves—through nature,
through working-class communities of color, through political
protests—though it would be more accurate to say he moves *with* them, for
while Herrera is a keen observer he is never just looking on. His poems are
acts of solidarity, a kind of extended family gathering, especially for
Latinx, Indigenous, and other communities of color. “With the poem, I can
design a little corner for my families that have passed to live on, and for
those brutalized by society to continue and be honored—to generate
kindness.” Drawing on disparate sources, from European Modernism to
Mesoamerican traditions to popular culture, Herrera creates a poetic voice
that is both deeply embedded and wholly original. “Poetry,” he writes, “has
gills and spears, spells and corn offerings, saxophones, tambourines and
dinner tables—the sky liquid of a Jimi Hendrix guitar.” The Poetry Society
of America is delighted and proud to award the Frost Medal, our highest
honor, to Juan Felipe Herrera, a poet of enormous heart and infinite
invention.
------------------------------

Son of farmworkers, *Juan Felipe Herrera *lives in Fresno with his wife,
poet Margarita Robles. During the last fifty years, he has dedicated his
life to poetry, community, art, and teaching. Herrera’s many collections of
poetry include *Every Day We Get More Illegal*; *Notes on the
Assemblage*; *Senegal
Taxi*; *Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems*, a recipient of
the PEN/Beyond Margins Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award;
and *187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross The Border: Undocuments 1971-2007*.
He is also the author of *Crashboomlove: A Novel in Verse*, which received
the Americas Award. His books of prose for children include*
SkateFate;* *Calling
The Doves*, which won the Ezra Jack Keats Award; *Upside Down Boy*, which
was adapted into a musical for young audiences in New York City; and *Cinnamon
Girl: Letters Found Inside a Cereal Box*. His various awards include the
National Book Critics Circle Award, NEA Poetry Fellowships, Guggenheim
Fellowship, *LA Times* Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award, Latino
Hall of Fame Award, Pushcart Prize, UCR/LARB Lifetime Achievement Award,
Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award, UCLA Chancellor’s Medal, and the Ruth
Lilly Lifetime Achievement Poetry Prize. In 2015, Herrera was appointed the
21st United States Poet Laureate, the first Mexican American to hold the
position.

A selection of Juan Felipe Herrera’s books can be purchased through the Poetry
Society of America’s store on Bookshop
<https://bookshop.org/lists/2023-frost-medalist-juan-felipe-herrera>, an
online bookstore with a mission to financially support local, independent
bookstores.
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