Mi cuarto est cerca de la cocina. My bedroom is close to the kitchen.

As she walks from her kitchen through a daisy-filled yard to the house next door, a little girl notices things that are close to each other -- just as the little boy she goes to visit is close to her.

Bilingual English/Spanish. The Upside Down Boy is award-winning poet Juan Felipe Herrera's engaging memoir of the year his migrant family settled down so that he could go to school for the first time.

Juanito is bewildered by the new school, and he misses the warmth of country life. Everything he does feels upside down. He eats lunch when it's recess; he goes out to play when it's time for lunch; and his tongue feels like a rock when he tries to speak English. But a sensitive teacher and loving family help him to find his voice and make a place for himself in this new world through poetry, art, and music.

Juan Felipe Herrera's playful language and the colorful, magical art of Elizabeth Gómez capture the universal experience of children entering a new school feeling like strangers in a world that seems upside down-at first.

El rbol de limones est lejos de mi casa. The lemon tree is far from my house.

The little boy's house is far from the city, and the city is far from the ocean. What about the mountains in the distance, or the clouds in the sky, or the sun that shines over the boy as he walks?

Bilingual English/Spanish. Award-winning children's book author and poet Juan Felipe Herrera offers a story of self-empowerment and friendship.

Kids race across the grass,
swooping like kites over an emerald sea.
No one notices
how fast I can spin my wheels.
Will I ever catch up?
Will they ever see me?

At his new school or on the soccer field, all everyone wants to know is why Tomasito is in a wheelchair. His Papi gives Tomasisto a new pet to make him smile, but this bird is a little bit different from the rest. Before long, this boy-bird team discovers that there's more than one way to fly-on or off the soccer field-and that those cheers Tomasito hears from the sidelines just might be for him. Goooooooooooal!

Award-winning children's book author and poet Juan Felipe Herrera scores yet again with this sparkling story of self-empowerment and friendship. The brilliant acrylic paintings by Ernesto Cuevas, Jr., soar off the page with joy.

Voted a Best Poetry Book of the Year by Library Journal

Included in Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Poetry Books of the Year

One of LitHub's most Anticipated Books of the Year!

A State of the Union from the nation's first Latino Poet Laureate. Trenchant, compassionate, and filled with hope.

Many poets since the 1960s have dreamed of a new hybrid art, part oral, part written, part English, part something else: an art grounded in ethnic identity, fueled by collective pride, yet irreducibly individual too. Many poets have tried to create such an art: Herrera is one of the first to succeed.--New York Times

Herrera has the unusual capacity to write convincing political poems that are as personally felt as poems can be.--NPR

Juan Felipe Herrera's magnificent new poems in Every Day We Get More Illegal testify to the deepest parts of the American dream--the streets and parking lots, the stores and restaurants and futures that belong to all--from the times when hope was bright, more like an intimate song than any anthem stirring the blood.--Naomi Shihab Nye, The New York Times Magazine

From Basho to Mandela, Every Day We Get More Illegal takes us on an international tour for a lesson in the history of resistance from a poet who declares, 'I had to learn . . . to take care of myself . . . the courage to listen to my self.' You hold in your hands evidence of who we really are.--Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition

These poems talk directly to America, to migrant people, and to working people. Herrera has created a chorus to remind us we are alive and beautiful and powerful.--José Olivarez, Author of Citizen Illegal

The poet comes to his country with a book of songs, and asks: America, are you listening? We better listen. There is wisdom in this book, there is a choral voice that teaches us 'to gain, pebble by pebble, seashell by seashell, the courage.' The courage to find more grace, to find flames.--Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic

In this collection of poems, written during and immediately after two years on the road as United States Poet Laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera reports back on his travels through contemporary America. Poems written in the heat of witness, and later, in quiet moments of reflection, coalesce into an urgent, trenchant, and yet hope-filled portrait. The struggle and pain of those pushed to the edges, the shootings and assaults and injustices of our streets, the lethal border game that separates and divides, and then: a shift of register, a leap for peace and a view onto the possibility of unity.

Every Day We Get More Illegal is a jolt to the conscience--filled with the multiple powers of the many voices and many textures of every day in America.

Former Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera should also be Laureate of our Millennium--a messenger who nimbly traverses the transcendental liminalities of the United States . . .--Carmen Gimenez Smith, author of Be Recorder

In the reverberations of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent shut down, Juan Felipe Herrera began a daily practice to draw and write mandala poems. Through this new practice, Herrera created well over 500 mandalas, a series of circles that served as contemplations, concentrations, and transformations of his consciousness within the isolation. Herrera documents the loss, suffering, and challenges of the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter Movement, an election cycle, as well as the onset of new wars and conflicts in Ukraine and into the present. Through verse and visual art Herrera moves away from a journal of the day to day, and instead, through a commitment to continue to excavate the days, arrives at the center of the mandala wheel to discover kindness, compassion, and healing. The Cosmic Flow blends the dexterity of Herrera's poetic, artistic, and spiritual practices developed over the last 50 years and provides the reader with a path forward in spite amidst the heaviness of the world.

Bilingual English/Spanish. Calling the Doves is Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera's story of his migrant farmworker childhood.

Calling the Doves is poet Juan Felipe Herrera's story of his migrant farmworker childhood. In delightful and lyrical language, he recreates the joy of eating breakfast under the open sky, listening to Mexican songs in the little trailer house his father built, and celebrating with other families at a fiesta in the mountains. He remembers his mother's songs and poetry, and his father's stories and his calling the doves. For Juan Felipe, the farmworker road was also the beginning of his personal road to becoming a writer.

Bilingual English/Spanish. Every Sunday, Juanito helps his grandmother sell old clothes beneath the rainbow-colored tents at the remate, the flea market.

Every Sunday Juanito helps his grandmother sell old clothes beneth the rainbow-colored tents at the remate, the flea market. There, Juanito and his friends romp from booth to booth, fulfilling Grandma's vision of the remate as a sharing community of friendly give-and-take.

Juanito gallops to the jewelry-man, who gives Juanito a copper bracelet and a watch for Grandma in exchange for her help sending money orders home to Mexico. Señora Vela gratefully accepts a bundle of Grandma's healing herbs in return for sacks of ruby red chiles. With every exchange Juanito learns firsthand what it means to be a true rematero - a fleamarketeer - and understands that the value of community can never be measured in dollars.

From U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, one of the most prominent Chicano poets writing today, here are poems like sweet music

Awarded the Pura Belpré Honor for this book, Herrera writes in both Spanish and English about the joy and laughter and sometimes the confusion of growing up in an upside-down, jumbled-up world--between two cultures, two homes.

With a crazy maraca beat, Herrera creates poetry as rich and vibrant as mole de olé and pineapple tamales...an aroma of papaya...a clear soup with strong garlic, so you will grow, not disappear. Herrera's words show us what it means to laugh out loud until it feels like flying.

Juan Felipe Herrera's vibrant poems dance across these pages in a dazzling explosion of two languages, English and Spanish. Skillfully crafted, beautiful, joyful, fun, the poems are paired with whimsical black-and-white drawings by Karen Barbour. The resulting collage fills the soul and celebrates a life lived between two cultures.

Laughing out loud, I fly, toward the good things, to catch Mamá Lucha on the sidewalk, afterschool, waiting for the green-striped bus, on the side of the neighborhood store, next to almonds, José's tiny wooden mule, the wise boy from San Diego, teeth split apart, like mine in the coppery afternoon . . .

Have you ever imagined what you might be when you grow up? When he was very young, Juan Felipe Herrera picked chamomile flowers in windy fields and let tadpoles swim across his hands in a creek. He slept outside and learned to say good-bye to his amiguitos each time his family moved to a new town. He went to school and taught himself to read and write English and filled paper pads with rivers of ink as he walked down the street after school. And when he grew up, he became the United States Poet Laureate and read his poems aloud on the steps of the Library of Congress. If he could do all of that . . . what could you do? With this illustrated poem of endless possibility, Juan Felipe Herrera and Lauren Castillo breathe magic into the hopes and dreams of readers searching for their place in life.

Originally released as a bilingual collection in 1989 by Stephen Kessler's Alcatraz Editions, Juan Felipe Herrera wrote the poems of Akrílica starting in 1977, occasioned by the energy and dialogue that he encountered upon meeting writer and co-conspirator Francisco X. Alarcón (1954-2016). Through a new interview included here and through his own Visual Introduction, archival photographs from his travels across the Americas, and new art created in conversation with the collection, Herrera offers a rich set of references, inspirations, and influences that shaped Akrílica while sharing his take on this singular book's place in his development as a poet and multimedia artist. This new edition and new translation of Akrílica arrives now to expand the political and artistic possibilities that form our current horizon. This project is not one of inclusion or recovery. This is a project of retrieval. We steal Akrílica away from literary institutions, away from the discipline of literature as such, and away from traditions of experimental poetics that should hope to claim it. Oriented toward the liveliness of the imagination, committed to fundamentally changing itself in order to meet the moment, Akrílica belongs somewhere else; it belongs in the hands of those finding one another in a gathering that has yet to take place.

Have you ever imagined what you might be when you grow up? When he was very young, Juan Felipe Herrera picked chamomile flowers in windy fields and let tadpoles swim across his hands in a creek. He slept outside and learned to say good-bye to his amiguitos each time his family moved to a new town. He went to school and taught himself to read and write English and filled paper pads with rivers of ink as he walked down the street after school. And when he grew up, he became the United States Poet Laureate and read his poems aloud on the steps of the Library of Congress. If he could do all of that . . . what could you do? With this illustrated poem of endless possibility, Juan Felipe Herrera and Lauren Castillo breathe magic into the hopes and dreams of readers searching for their place in life.

In Rebozos there are celebrations, sweat lodges, songs calling out liberation, infinities of self & there is sweet corn, frijol, heart, naked earth & body, flaming waters, Quetzalcoatl, the speaking Quetzal, thorns, new words & shells, unfolding flowers, adobe, pueblos, venados, constellations, revelations of hemispheric unity, voice-stories from New Mexico, feathers & guitars, chakira, kupurisol - the essence of the sun. I enjoyed writing this book. I unshackled it, no titles, no page numbers. Sometimes I broke away from typical gendered terms in Spanish, I introduced Nahuatl deities and Huichol terms & there are drawings here & there, perhaps, like our Native weavings & yarn portals. Imagine yourself standing on a mountain at dawn, singing these poems from 1970 to 1974, at the crossroads of many social movements. At the beginning of a new wave of Latinx literature.

In this novel in verse--unprecedented in Chicano literature--renowned poet Juan Felipe Herrera illuminates the soul of a generation. Drawn from his own life as well as a lifetime of dedication to young people, CrashBoomLove helps readers understand what it is to be a teen, a migrant worker, and a boy wanting to be a boy.

Sixteen-year-old C sar Garc a is careening. His father, Papi C sar, has left the migrant circuit in California for his other wife and children in Denver. Sweet Mama Lucy tries to provide for her son with dichos and tales of her own misspent youth. But at Rambling West High School in Fowlerville, the sides are drawn: Hmongs vs. Chicanos vs. everybody vs. C sar, the new kid on the block.

Precise and profound, CrashBoomLove will appeal to and resonate with high school readers across the country.

From U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera comes the powerful journey of Chicano teen Lucky Z. A former skateboarder who's anything but lucky, he finds triumph and power through his voice. Raw, cool, real--this novel in verse is a shout-out to teens to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, to raise their voice and find strength in the sheer and simple power of expression.

Lucky Z has always lived on the edge--he loved to skateboard, to drag race, to feel alive. But things have taken a turn--he's living with new foster parents and a tragic past. An accident changed everything. And only his voice will set him free. As you feel Lucky breathe in life again, you will want to shout out with him.

The Books We Love in 2016 - The New Yorker

Best Poetry Collections of 2015 - The Washington Post

Best Books 2015: Poetry - Library Journal

Best Books of 2015 - NPR Books

16 Best Poetry Books of 2015 - BuzzFeed Books

Juan Felipe Herrera, the first Latino Poet Laureate of the United States and son of Mexican immigrants, grew up in the migrant fields of California.

Exuberant and socially engaged, reflective and healing, this collection of new work from the nation's first Latino Poet Laureate is brimming with the wide-open vision and hard-won wisdom of a poet whose life and creative arc have spanned chasms of culture in an endless crossing, dreaming and back again.

[This year] Juan Felipe Herrera's Notes on the Assemblage has been a ladder of hope ...--Ada Limón, The New Yorker

Juan Felipe Herrera's family has gone from migrant worker to poet laureate of the United States in one generation. One generation. I am an adamant objector to the Horatio Alger myth of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, but Herrera's story is one of epic American proportions. The heads carved into my own Mount Rushmás would be Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Frida Kahlo, El Chapulín Colorado, Selena, and Juan Felipe Herrera. Notes from the Assemblage further carves out Herrera's place in American letters.--David Tomas Martinez

At home with field workers, wage slaves, the homeless, little children, old folks, artists, traditionalists, the avant-garde, students, scholars and prisoners, the bilingual Juan Felipe Herrera is the real thing: a populist treasure. He will fulfill his appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate with the same high energy, savvy, passion, compassion, commitment and playfulness that his art and life's have always embodied. Bravo! Bravo!--Al Young

While reporters can give you the what, when, and where of a war, a poet with the enormous gifts of Juan Herrera can give you its soul.--Ishmael Reed

I am proud that Juan Felipe Herrera has been appointed U.S. Poet Laureate, bringing his truthful, beautiful voice to all of us universally. As the first Chicano Laureate, he will empower all diverse cultures.--Janice Mirikitani

Herrera is ... a sometimes hermetic, wildly inventive, always unpredictable poet, whose work commands attention for its style alone ... Many poets since the 1960s have dreamed of a new hybrid art, part oral, part written, part English, part something else: an art grounded in ethnic identity, fueled by collective pride, yet irreducibly individual too. Many poets have tried to create such an art: Herrera is one of the first to succeed.--The New York Times

Herrera has the unusual capacity to write convincing political poems that are as personally felt as poems can be.--National Public Radio

Can you walk and talk at the same time? How about Jabber Walk? Can you write and draw and walk and journal all at the same time? If not, you're in luck: exuberant, blue-cheesy cilantro man Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States, is here to teach you everything he knows about being a real-life, bonified, jabberwalking poet Jabberwalkers write and speak for themselves and others no matter where their feet may take them -- to jabberwalk is to be a poet on the move. And there's no stopping once you're a Jabberwalker, writing fast, fast, fast, scribble-poem-burbles-on-the-run. Scribble what you see Scribble what you hear It's all out there -- v monos

Have you ever imagined what you might be when you grow up? When he was very young, Juan Felipe Herrera picked chamomile flowers in windy fields and let tadpoles swim across his hands in a creek. He slept outside and learned to say goodbye to his amiguitos each time his family moved to a new town. He went to school and taught himself to read and write English and filled paper pads with rivers of ink as he walked down the street after school. And when he grew up, he became the United States Poet Laureate and read his poems aloud on the steps of the Library of Congress. If he could do all of that . . . what could you do? With this illustrated poem of endless possibility, Juan Felipe Herrera and Lauren Castillo breathe magic into the hopes and dreams of readers searching for their place in life.

ALGUNA VEZ has imaginado qui n ser s cuando crezcas?

Cuando Juan Felipe Herrera era ni o, recogi flores, ayud a su mam a alimentar a los pollitos, durmi bajo el cielo centelleante y aprendi a decirles adi s a sus amiguitos cada vez que su familia segu a el camino campesino. Al crecer, Juan Felipe Herrera se convirti en poeta.
Su hermoso poema, Imagina y las sugerentes ilustraciones de Lauren Castillo le hablar n a cada lector y so ador que est buscando su lugar en la vida.

Qui n podr as llegar a ser? Imagina . . .

Have you ever imagined what you might be when you grow up? When he was very young, Juan Felipe Herrera picked chamomile flowers in windy fields and let tadpoles swim across his hands in a creek. He slept outside and learned to say goodbye to his amiguitos each time his family moved to a new town. He went to school and taught himself to read and write English and filled paper pads with rivers of ink as he walked down the street after school. And when he grew up, he became the United States Poet Laureate and read his poems aloud on the steps of the Library of Congress. If he could do all of that . . . what could you do? With this newly translated illustrated poem of endless possibility, Juan Felipe Herrera and Lauren Castillo breathe magic into the hopes and dreams of readers searching for their place in life.

Juan Felipe Hererra's writing fuses wide-ranging experimentalism with reflections on Mexican-American identity . . .--The New York Times

In forty cantos, the poet explores the metaphysical relationship between Frida Kahlo, her art, her broken body, and cross-border consciousness. First published in 1994, this early work--his sixth book--reveals a deep sense of longing for all to be made whole again in spite of fractures--physical, metaphorical, cultural--bestowed by the world.

From Prologue: A Second Body:

Think on the time it takes a scar to heal,

a river to rise -- an old woman to regain the tumbling
powers of her busted arms -- a young woman (calling
herself Frida) to re-structure her shattered vertebrae, to
be caught up with a body-cast, a second body which she
inhabits -- for the rest of her life; this is precious to me,
that is all.

She painted herself somewhere in-between Mexico and
the United States -- in the open space of the jaws; between
the mandibles of the jaguar and the nuclear turbine.

It is the healing of this metaphysical fracture too (which
may invoke further breakage) that concerns me.

Juan Felipe Herrera was raised in a farm-working family in the San Joaquin Valley. A graduate of UCLA, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and Stanford University, he has written numerous books. Herrera's awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN USA Award. Former Poet Laureate of California and now United States Poet Laureate, he lives in Fresno.