JUAN FELIPE HERRERA (Charter Advisory Board Member)
The son of migrant workers, Juan Felipe Herrera earned a BA at UCLA, MA from Stanford University in Anthropology—the subject of his BA studies—followed by a Creative Writing Master’s degree from the renowned University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. After 15 years as a professor at Fresno State, in 2005 he was appointed to the Tomas Rivera Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at UC Riverside. In March 2012, he was appointed the first-ever Latino Poet Laureate of California by Governor Jerry Brown. His numerous awards include several National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, four grants from the California Arts Council, the UC Berkeley Regent’s Fellowship, the Breadloaf Fellowship in Poetry, and Stanford’s Chicano Fellows Fellowship. He is the author of scores of book publications, most notably in the genres of poetry, prose, and children’s literature. Herrera was a charter member of the CCPP Advisory Board from 2006-2009 and reappointed for a second term in 2009. From 2015-17, Herrera served as the first-ever Chicano Poet Laureate of the United States. He has a long and valued association with CCPP. In the first year of CCPP’s existence in the College of Arts and Letters (2004-05)—before receiving its Presidential Charter (2006)—Juan Felipe Herrera was a visiting writer in the new Center’s inaugural year. As an Advisory Board member, it was he who proposed the selection of Victor Hernández Cruz—the first-ever Latino Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets—as the 2009 Jean Burden Reader. Cruz was the first-ever Latino poet to be featured in the Jean Burden Series. Herrera has been of inestimable practical and conceptual help in facilitating numerous CCPP directives, priorities, and events. Herrera himself served as the Jean Burden Poet in 2016.
LINDA MARGARITA GREENBERG
Linda Margarita Greenberg is Professor of English and English Department Chair at California State University, Los Angeles. She is currently finishing a book project on the Chicana author, Helena María Viramontes, that situates Viramontes’ fiction within the context of the Chicano/a movement, transnational feminism, ecocriticism, and cultural memory. Her teaching and research interests cover the spectrum of U.S. Ethnic Literatures, with particular focus on 20th and 21st century American literature, Latinx and Asian American literature, racial and gendered narratives about undocumented immigrants, feminist fantasy and speculative fiction, bridges between literary criticism and creative writing, and intersections between pedagogy and social justice. She is also deeply invested in rooting community engagement and pre-professional practices within English curriculum and the discipline.
WILL ALEXANDER
Will Alexander is a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, aphorist, visual artist, and pianist. He is the author of over 30 books and chapbooks. A Whiting and California Arts Council Fellow, he has been a recipient of the PEN Oakland Award, an American Book Award, as well as a Jackson Prize for Poetry in 2016. Currently he is the Poet-in-Residence at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, California.
ANDREW LYNDON KNIGHTON (DIRECTOR)
Andrew Lyndon Knighton is Professor of English and Director of the Center for Contemporary Poetry and Poetics at California State University, Los Angeles. During his career at Cal State LA, he has served as Chair and Associate Chair of English, directed the Cal State LA/NEH American Communities Program, and been appointed to the Joseph A. Bailey II, M.D., Endowed Chair in American Communities. He teaches an array of courses in American literary history, as well as seminars in cultural theory, literary criticism, and poetry and poetics. His book, Idle Threats: Men and the Limits of Productivity in Nineteenth-Century America, was published by New York University Press in 2012; he has published research on figures such as Herman Melville, Nathanael West, and Nathaniel Parker Willis in journals including ESQ, ATQ, The Journal for the Study of Radicalism, and Literature Interpretation Theory. Currently, he is working on a study of the radical poet Thomas McGrath.