The son of migrant farm workers in California, Juan Felipe Herrera traces his love of poetry to childhood and singing songs about the Mexican Revolution learned from his mother. He would go on to become his home state’s poet laureate and, in September 2015, the first Latino poet laureate of the U.S. The New York Times hailed him as one of the first poets to successfully create “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.”

Herrera discusses his life and poetry and reads from his works.

His presentation is the inaugural event in the William H. Hickok Series, presented annually by The Writers Place and made possible in part by funding from the Richard J. Stern Foundation for the Arts.

The William H. Hickok Reading Series honors the late co-founder of Kansas City’s literary community center, The Writers Place.