Teachers Institute Reading

Juan Felipe Herrera is the 21st Poet Laureate of the United States (2015-2016) and is the first Latino to hold the position. From 2012-2014, Herrera served as California State Poet Laureate. Herrera’s many collections of poetry include: Every Day We Get More Illegal; Notes on the Assemblage; Senegal Taxi; Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems, a recipient of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross The Border: Undocuments 1971-2007. He is also the author of Crashboomlove: A Novel in Verse, which received the Americas Award. His books of prose for children include SkateFate, Calling The Doves, which won the Ezra Jack Keats Award; Upside Down Boy, which was adapted into a musical for young audiences in New York City; and Cinnamon Girl: Letters Found Inside a Cereal Box. His book Jabberwalking, a children’s book focused on turning your wonder at the world around you into weird, wild, incandescent poetry, came out in 2018. Herrera is also a performance artist and activist on behalf of migrant and indigenous communities and at-risk youth.

Jaswinder Bolina’s fourth collection English as a Second Language and Other Poems is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in October 2023. He is the author of three previous books of poetry, The 44th of July (2019), Phantom Camera (2013), and Carrier Wave (2007), and of the digital chapbook The Tallest Building in America (2014). His debut collection of essays Of Color (2020) is also available from McSweeney's. He teaches on the faculty of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Miami.

Christell Victoria Roach is an Emmy-nominated poet and performer from Miami, Florida. As a descendant of Miami’s first Black Pioneers, she writes about Blackness, the Blues, and many different types of love. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Miami after graduating from Emory University with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Creative Writing & African American Studies. She writes poetry that embraces and expands the Southern Gothic to the tropics. Her recent work has been published by the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Magazine, Obsidian Literary Journal, Scalawag Magazine, The Miami Rail, and SWIMM Magazine. She is currently working on her first book of poetry entitled, “Bluesing."