Senegal Taxi

Juan Felipe Herrera is a noted writer, performer, poet, and playwright. He is a professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. Herrera was educated at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Stanford University, and has an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has published twenty-eight volumes of poetry, prose, theater, children's books, and young adult novels, including 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross the Border: Undocuments 1971-2007 (2007); Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems (University of Arizona Press, 2008), which was a recipient of the PEN/ Beyond Margins Award and was a winner of the National Book Critics Circle award in poetry; and Cinnamon Girl: Letters Found Inside a Cereal Box (2005). He is the winner of over fifty awards, fellowships, and honorable mentions, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Poetry Fellowship in 2010, the PEN USA Award in Poetry, the Hungry Mind Award of Distinction, the Ezra Jack Keats Award, two Latino Hall of Fame Poetry awards, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the University of California at Berkeley Regent's Fellowship, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council; he is a New York Times Notable. He was appointed California poet laureate in March 2012 and is the first Chicano writer to serve in the post.