Juan Felipe Herrera is a graduate of the Floricanto Generation of '71, campesino migrant treks, and multimedia political theater experiments. He has founded percussion and jazz poetry ensembles, Chicano teatros, and poetry brigades, and has taken his various word troupes across the United States and into Mexico and Latin America for the last thirty years. He has served as editor of a number of groundbreaking small-press magazines such as Red Trapeze, El Tecolote Literario, Gato's Journal, Bovine Interventions, and Citybender, and university reviews including Vórtice, Metamorfosis, and Naranjas y Nopales. He holds degrees from the University of California-Los Angeles, Stanford University, and the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, and he has received numerous awards for his writing. Recent prized novels include Cinnamon Girl: Letters Found Inside a Cereal Box and Downtown Boy. He is currently the Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California-Riverside. He lives in Redlands, California, with his wife, the performance artist Margarita Robles.
