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" 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. "

Juan Felipe Herrera

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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

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

Juan Felipe Herrera

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

Juan Felipe Herrera

" 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. "

Juan Felipe Herrera

" 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. "

Juan Felipe Herrera

" 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.' "

Juan Felipe Herrera

" 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

" 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. "

Juan Felipe Herrera

" 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. "

Juan Felipe Herrera

" 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

" 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. "

Juan Felipe Herrera

" 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. "

Juan Felipe Herrera

" 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

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

Juan Felipe Herrera

" 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. "

Juan Felipe Herrera

" 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. "

Juan Felipe Herrera

" 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. "

Juan Felipe Herrera

" 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. "

Juan Felipe Herrera

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

Juan Felipe Herrera

" Do not wait for a poem; a poem is too fast for you. Do not wait for the poem; run with the poem and then write the poem. "

Juan Felipe Herrera

" 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. "

Juan Felipe Herrera

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

Juan Felipe Herrera

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

Juan Felipe Herrera

" 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. "

Juan Felipe Herrera