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" I'm a political poet - let us say a 'human' poet, a poet that's concerned with the plight of people who suffer. If words can be of assistance, then that's what I'm going to use. "

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" Migrants all over the world are pushed and pulled across borders by hunger, terror and climate change. It happened to my own family. "

Juan Felipe Herrera

Hunger

Family

My Own

" I write while I'm walking, on little scraps of paper. If I have a melody going, I can feel it for days. "

" Marvin Bell always looked very closely at how lines could break, how you could put over one line into the second line. How you could stop the line two or three times within the line: You could make it stop. "

" First grade was - I spoke only Spanish, and second grade - probably a bit more English. And by the time I hit third grade, I was learning, of course, much, much more English. "

Juan Felipe Herrera

Time

First

" What I really had was stories, the oral traditions of my parents. We moved so much that that was really our encyclopedia. A dream world told to me from my parents in the living room. "

" I used to stand on the corner in San Diego with poems sticking out of my hip pocket, asking people if there was a place where I could read poems. The audience is half of the poem. "

" I remember looking at James Joyce's journals. It was just amazing - it looked like ants had written on the page. So much writing on one page, every corner of the page was filled. Some of the lines were underlined in yellow or blue or red. A lot of color, intense writing. "

" Let's detox our cluttered academic brain. That's what the poet does. People call it daydreaming, detoxing our minds and taking care of that clutter. It's being able to let in call letters from the poetry universe. "

" A pen is different from the pad, the key, moving your fingers across a screen. I like both. I like to work on sketchbooks, big old white sketch paper. I like how that feels, and I like to put different media on it. Then there's the phone, smartphone, iPad: It's the new page, and it's not the same page anymore. "

" Sometimes you can do things with Spanish - like verbs and genders - easier than you can in English. "

Juan Felipe Herrera

Things

Sometimes

" The more we engage in society, the more firsts we have, then there will be a moment when we have no more firsts. Or maybe there will always be new firsts. "

" I tell my workshop students, 'I want you to think of yourselves as artists. Then, when you're writing, you're painting, you're crafting, you're making a design, you're sculpting, you're creating choreography, sound, a sound script.' "

" Sometimes I have a very fleeting emotional dance with a fleeting phrase, like 'half-Mexican.' "

" I want our young Latinos and Latinas to write their hearts out and express their hearts out and let us all listen to each other. "

Juan Felipe Herrera

Hearts

Write

" My parents moved from ranch to ranch, valley to valley, town to town, but our roots in Fowler never really faded. For me, it's a place of history, stories and songs, not just facts and figures. "

" San Diego shaped me a lot. The visual landscapes, the emotional panoramas, the teachers and mentors I had from the third grade through San Diego High - it's all a big part of the poetry fountain that I continue to drink from. "

" All voices are important, and yet it seems that people of color have a lot to say, particularly if you look through the poetry of young people - a lot of questions and a lot of concerns about immigration and security issues, you name it - big questions. "

" Yes, I am the first Latino poet laureate in the United States. But I'm also here for everyone and from everyone. My voice is made by everyone's voices. "

" Poetry is a call to action, and it also is action. "

" Diversity really means becoming complete as human beings - all of us. We learn from each other. If you're missing on that stage, we learn less. We all need to be on that stage. "

Juan Felipe Herrera

Need

Stage

" I am representing California, and all of California, definitely as a Mexicano, a Chicano, a Latino. "

" I've worked throughout California as a poet: in colleges, universities, worker camps, migrant education offices, continuation high schools, juvenile halls, prisons, and gifted classrooms. "

" Poetry can tell us about what's going on in our lives - not only our personal but our social and political lives. "

" As a boy, I felt ashamed of being Mexican. I'd say I was Hawaiian. "