California State Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera to Visit Redlands, CA Jan. 20

.

• By Guy McCarthy

The California State Poet Laureate is coming to the Contemporary Club in Redlands, CA on Jan. 20, and he is seeking poems. Juan Felipe Herrera is author of 28 books and currently serves as the Tomas Rivera Endowed Chair for the Department of Creative Writing at UC Riverside. He was appointed Poet Laureate for the state of California in March 2012.

When Herrera comes to Redlands he plans to discuss his signature Poet Laureate project, "The Most Incredible & Biggest Poem on Unity in the World," according to announcements from A.K. Smiley Public Library and the Inlandia Institute, the nonprofit literary center in Riverside.

Herrera will also be collecting contributions of poetry from the public, the key element of "The Most Incredible & Biggest Poem," library and institute officials said.

To assist his collection efforts, Herrera launched a Facebook page in September 2012 dedicated to compiling fragments of contributed poetry, officials said. "The tagline reads, 'Put your Unity into Action - write a poem for unity - or a phrase or a line. All languages, bilingual too - to create One collective poem for all to see.' Along with contributions that have come through other channels, Herrera is at work creating what he hopes will be the largest community-based poetry project on the subject of unity that has ever been attempted," library and institute officials said.

Herrera's latest request is for contributions of poetry paying tribute to victims of the Dec. 14 shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. He started this recent effort with his poem, "Little Ones We Carry You," and dozens more poems have been contributed by others since its launch, officials said.

Herrera is a former professor and chair of Chicano and Latin American Studies at California State University, Fresno, from 1990 to 2004 and a teaching assistant fellow at the Iowa Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa from 1988 to 1990. His work has received critical acclaim including national and international awards, library and institute officials said.

"The mission of the California Poet Laureate is to advocate for the art of poetry in classrooms and boardrooms across the state, to inspire an emerging generation of literary artists, and to educate all Californians about the many poets and authors who have influenced our great state through creative literary expression," officials said.

The Inlandia Institute publishes regional writing in print and electronic form, including books published in partnership with Heyday under the Inlandia imprint, the annual Inlandia creative writing anthology, Writing from Inlandia, and the online literary journal, Inlandia: A Literary Journey, according to the institute.

The institute also provides creative literacy programs for children, as well as creative writing workshops for teens and adults in Riverside, Idyllwild, Ontario and Palm Springs.

Anyone can contribute to the "The Most Incredible & Biggest Poem on Unity in the World," including people who attend the event in Redlands. Contributions can also be emailed to juan.herrera@ucr.edu or mailed to:

The Redlands event is planned at 1 p.m. Jan. 20 at the Contemporary Club, 173 S. Eureka St., Redlands, CA, adjacent to the A.K. Smiley Public Library.

Light refreshments will be served. For more information, call Cati Porter at (951) 218-4464 or Smiley Library at (909) 798-7565.

-30-

Chicana Literature, Creative Arts Scholar Named Tomás Rivera Chair

[Click photo to enlarge]
By Bettye Miller for UCR Today

Theater professor Tiffany Ana López , the granddaughter of migrant farmworkers, fills chair honoring UC Riverside’s fourth chancellor

Fleeing an abusive home and on her own at age 15, Tiffany Ana López planned a career as a Burger King franchise owner. The life of a scholar was unimaginable. But a series of mentors — high school teachers, community college instructors and a Latina poet at Cal State Sacramento — encouraged her to dream big.

López, now a professor of theater at the University of California, Riverside, has been named the Tomás Rivera Chair in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. She becomes the second scholar to hold the prestigious endowed chair at UC Riverside, succeeding Juan Felipe Herrera, who has held the position since 2005. Gov. Jerry Brown named Herrera the California Poet Laureate in March, a two-year appointment that will take the Latino poet into classrooms and community centers throughout the state.

“I am incredibly proud to be honored in this way,” said López, a longtime admirer of Rivera for his creativity as a poet and author, his scholarship and his administrative leadership. “When you’re an endowed chair you’re a living memorial. Like Tomás Rivera I feel duty-bound to serve the public by emphasizing that students finish their degrees and have a sense about what they want to do to change the world when they leave the university. Our students represent passion, hope and the future.”

Rivera was UC Riverside’s fourth chancellor, serving from 1979 until his death after a heart attack in 1984. Rivera was the first Hispanic and first minority chancellor in the UC system. The endowed chair, funded by Rivera’s family and other donors, provides financial support for teaching and research to a senior faculty member. The chair-holder also coordinates the annual Tomás Rivera Conference.

In announcing the appointment of López, Stephen Cullenberg, dean of the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, said, “Tomás Rivera was a world-class poet, author, scholar and administrator. Tiffany Lopez’s record of creativity, scholarship and administration make her a perfect fit for the Tomás Rivera endowed chair. She brings passion, sensitivity and deep knowledge to every project she engages. We are looking forward to the many new and exciting projects she will develop while she holds the Tomás Rivera chair.”

López joined the UCR English department in 1995 as the university’s first specialist in Chicana/o literature. She currently is a professor in the Department of Theatre. Her research focuses on issues of trauma and violence and the ways that theater, literature and art provide avenues for personal healing, community building and social change.

“I left home to escape horrific domestic violence and the violence of poverty,” she explained. “I try to help students develop a vocabulary to talk about issues that impact all of us. That empowers them to be more present with their work and their goals, and enables them to be better students and understand their own histories.”

The granddaughter of migrant farmworkers and the first in her family to attend college, Lopez describes herself as “an accidental academic.”

A Burger King restaurant manager at age 16, the future she envisioned entailed earning an A.A. degree so she could become a franchisee. Three instructors at Cosumnes River College in Sacramento encouraged her to transfer to California State University, Sacramento to earn her bachelor’s degree instead.

She enrolled in a program for students who showed promise and were at-risk, and found a mentor in the English department, Chicana poet Olivia Castellano.

“She created employment for me and transitioned my frame of reference to an institution of higher learning,” Lopez said. “She involved me in a program tutoring families of migrant farmworkers in English composition. She was a poet who trained me to become a professor of literature and to understand the transformative nature of education, and instilled in me the need to understand what it means to be an artist.”

After completing her bachelor’s degree at CSU Sacramento, Lopez spent a year participating in creative writing workshops with foundational Chicano literary figures such as Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo and Rudolfo Anaya. She went on to earn a master’s degree and a Ph.D. at UC Santa Barbara, where she edited  an anthology, “Growing Up Chicana/o” (William Morrow & Co., 1993), which Publishers Weekly praised as 20 stories that “affirm the potency of Chicano literature.”

Since then, López has edited Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (2005-2012) and has published numerous essays, articles, chapters and reviews in books and journals, including Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, “Prose and Cons: Essays on Prison Literature in the United States,” “Ethnic Literary Traditions in American Children’s Literature” and “The Blackwell Companion to Twentieth-Century American Drama.” She is completing a book project, “The Alchemy of Blood,” about art as a form of engaging with issues of trauma and violence, and collaborating on a biography with visual artist Barbara Carrasco.

She was a Fulbright Scholar to Spain in 2004 and has received grants from the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation for her work on intellectual diversity and the creative arts. As a community artist, López has collaborated with theaters such as The Mark Taper Forum, The Latino Theater Company, and Breath of Fire Latina Theater Ensemble; and is an ensemble member of Company of Angels. She is a faculty advisory board member for the Barbara and Art Culver Center of the Arts and a member of a Mellon working group on medical narratives. She is a member of Campus Women Lead and the National Advisory Board of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social.

At UCR she has participated in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences First Year Experience Program and the Mentoring Summer Research Internship Program. She was recognized for her work with students by a Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research in 2009.

López said she has spent her career trying to pass on to her students what she gained from her education and how to live a life of vision and promise.

“I see myself in my students,” she said. “I understand what they are searching for in terms of a mentor and a language to better navigate not only their work at the university but also their lives. It’s not just about getting them through the subject matter or a degree. It’s what Tomás Rivera talked about in ‘And the Earth Did Not Devour Him’ — the seed of love in the darkness. At UCR we are sowing seeds.”

-30-

UCR professor Juan Felipe Herrera sworn in as California Poet Laureate

Written by Eric Gamboa for the University of California Riverside Highlander

Click photo to enlarge. Click header to go to original article.

University of California Riverside Professor Juan Felipe Herrera will be California’s first Chicano Poet Laureate, upon senate confirmation. On March 21, California Governor Jerry Brown appointed Herrera, whose work focuses on the Chicano experience—a subject that holds special significance to Herrera since he was the son of migrant farm workers. “No one is more worthy than Juan Felipe Herrera, both for this distinctive honor and for the task at hand as the California Poet Laureate,” proclaimed UC Riverside Chancellor Tim White in his weekly email. Within a week of the appointment, Herrera traveled to Sacramento where the governor swore him in.

Herrera currently serves as the Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair at UC Riverside’s Creative Writing Department. “I want to thank UC Riverside for such a great community of support. All the students here inspire me greatly. This award is for all the young writers who want to put kindness inside every word throughout the state, because kindness is the heart of creativity,” stated Herrera in an article by UCR Today.

According to Herrera’s personal website, the renowned poet has published 24 volumes of work including theater, children’s books and young adult novels. Herrera, a graduate of UC Los Angeles and Stanford University, has received dozens of highly prestigious awards and has seen much of his work been turned into plays and musicals. “Many poets since the 1960s have dreamed of 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. Many poets have tried to create such an art: Herrera is one of the first to succeed,” noted a New York Times review of Herrera’s work, as quoted in the governor’s press release.

The position of California Poet Laureate was created in 2001 and is primarily shaped by the California Arts Council. The council, which consists of 11 experts in fields such as the arts, education, and community development, are tasked with selecting candidates who would best promote and serve as an advocate of poetry in the state of California. Following his senate confirmation, Herrera will begin his two-year term and his tasks will include providing six public readings and completing a cultural project with the goal of exposing poetry to individuals of all backgrounds.

According to the California Arts Council website, the criteria for selecting the Poet Laureate depend on the achievement of scholarly excellence, the size of published work, the reputation of the poet and the willingness to partake in the cultural project. The Poet Laureate position has been vacant since September 2011 and was last held by University of Southern California Professor Carol Muske-Dukes.

“This honor reflects what we have had the privilege of seeing up close ever since he joined our distinguished faculty: namely, this remarkably gifted poet’s unique ability to connect—through his art and teaching—with everyone, regardless of their cultural or educational background,” stated Andrew Winer, chair of the Department of Creative Writing, in the UCR Today article.

Herrera’s recent accomplishments include being elected to the Academy of American Poets’ Board of Chancellors and receiving the 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry.

-30-

UCR Class to Investigate Documentary Photography

[Photo: John's Furniture, Globe, AZ Series, Click image to make larger. Copyright 2009 Jesús Manuel Mena Garza.]

California photographer Jesús Manuel Mena Garza will illuminate his and other documentary photographers work in a class offered at the University of California, Riverside, Extension. The course is titled, Documentary Photography and is scheduled for May 5 through June 2, 2009.

Garza explained, “The new class will give students an opportunity to explore how photography interprets our society. As a photographer, I feel it is important to capture a vanishing America before it inevitably disappears. The beauty of our communities and people should be immortalized on photographic paper.”

The photographers adds, “Students in the course will learn the art of visual storytelling — whether for a single editorial image, for feature stories or books or for creating a personal record of things observed. Students will explore ways to execute photos through a range of styles and subjects and create a story line from concept to final print.”

The class will inform students on diverse photographic processes. Students will learn to take better images with strong, sensitive and effective visual qualities by producing several themed projects. These same projects can work as a portfolio.

-30-