Juan Felipe Herrera

If I can only be known as one thing, then, well, I guess it would be poet and performer and teacher.

I know I'm representing the Library of Congress, all the people of the United States and, of course, the Latinos and Latinas as well.

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.'

We went from crop to crop, field to field. And my father had that army truck, a 1940s army truck from Fort Bliss, El Paso.

Sometimes it's like that. I go, 'You know what? I'm going to just change scales. I'm going to even change instruments. And I'm going to go into the chromatics of the Spanish language,' and I do. You know, the poem is totally different. It's like a lunar voice versus a day voice, a solar voice.

I'm usually writing in English, and then I'll get the hankering to change channels. And usually I'll do that when I want to try a whole new set of keys, like musical keys.

Migrants all over the world are pushed and pulled across borders by hunger, terror and climate change. It happened to my own family.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.