Juan Felipe Herrera '72

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Juan Felipe Herrera '72, a UCLA Medal recipient and the former U.S. poet laureate, has been awarded a "genius grant" by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation as a 2024 MacArthur Fellow.

The Fellowship is awarded to talented individuals in a variety of fields who have shown exceptional originality in and dedication to their creative pursuits. Fellows receive $800,000 stipends that are bestowed with no conditions; recipients may use the money as they see fit. Nominated anonymously by leaders in their respective fields and considered by an anonymous selection committee, recipients learn of their selection only when they receive a call from the MacArthur Foundation just before the public announcement.

In addition to recognizing and supporting exceptional creativity, the Foundation hopes that the Fellowship will inspire people to pursue their own creative interests.

Herrera is a poet, educator, and writer uplifting Chicanx culture and amplifying shared experiences of solidarity and empowerment through poetry and prose for adults and children. Herrera’s literary output, in both English and Spanish, crosses genres and spans five decades; his work is united by deep empathy and joy for all groups in the act of artistic creation.

After receiving his B.A. in anthropology from UCLA, Herrera earned his an M.A. from Stanford University in 1980 and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1990. He is the author of over 30 books, including "Senegal Taxi" (2013), "Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems" (2008) and "Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream" (1998).

Herrera is professor emeritus at UC Riverside and at Cal State Fresno, where he coordinates the Laureate Lab Visual Wordist Studio. He served as California Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2015 and Poet Laureate of the United States from 2015 to 2017. Herrera’s poem "Sunriders" was engraved on a plaque sent on NASA's unmanned Lucy mission in 2021 and the Juan Felipe Herrera Elementary School, a bilingual school in Fresno, California, opened in 2022.

Read the UCLA Newsroom article here.