Includes a **16-page booklet** with photos and liner notes by noted cultural critic GENE SEYMOUR... *PLUS* I'd be delighted to autograph the CD however you'd like me to sign it (within reason of course!) - a GREAT GIFT - Help spread the message! Thank you for your support!
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Juan Felipe Herrera is a poet, performer, writer, cartoonist, teacher, and activist. Herrera was the 21st United States Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017.
Herrera's experiences as the child of migrant farmers have strongly shaped his work, such as the children's book Calling the Doves, which won the Ezra Jack Keats Book Award in 1997. Community and art have always been part of what has driven Herrera, beginning in the mid-1970s, when he was director of the Centro Cultural de la Raza, an occupied water tank in Balboa Park that had been converted into an arts space for the community.
Herrera’s publications include fourteen collections of poetry, prose, short stories, young adult novels and picture books for children, with twenty-one books in total in the last decade. His 2007 volume 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross the Border: Undocuments 1971-2007 contains texts in both Spanish and English that examine the cultural hybridity that "revolve around questions of identity" on the U.S.-Mexico border. Herrera was awarded the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for Half the World in Light. In 2012, he was appointed California Poet Laureate by Gov. Jerry Brown.
INSIDE SCOOP: Boone set Poem by Poem for choir, and it was performed at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC in 2017.
lyrics
From the Liner Notes:
Juan Felipe Herrera’s ruminative word duet with Craig VonBerg’s piano, which is a sonic monument to the nine African Americans killed in June, 2015 by a white supremacist gunman while they were attending a Bible study class at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina (where Herrera, a former U.S. Poet Laureate, first read the poem). Herrera shares with Jess the impulse to individualize Black victims, to take or at least mitigate the “mass” in “mass shooting”: “they are not nine / they are each one / alive…” For Herrera, as indeed with all these poets, their art is not a withdrawal from action, but action itself: “you have a poem to offer it is made of action — you must / search for it – run / outside / and give your life to it / when you find it – walk it / back – blow upon it / carry it taller than the city where you live ...”
credits
from The Poets Are Gathering,
released October 16, 2020
Juan Felipe Herrera (p/n), Craig VonBerg (pn)
Benjamin Boone is a jazz saxophonist, composer, professor, and U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Ireland (2022-23), Ghana (2017-18)
and the Republic of Moldova (2006). His Origin Records album THE POETRY OF JAZZ was #3 "Best Album of 2018" in the 83rd Annual Downbeat Readers Poll and featured on NPR's All Things Considered, The Paris Review, and many others. Websites: BenjaminBoone.com & OriginArts.com...more
Trio helmed by director, author, and actor Jean-Paul Delore translates various texts by French and African writers into vibrant jazz fusion. Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 7, 2024