Juan Felipe Herrera (born on December 27, 1948) is an American poet, performer, writer, toonist, teacher, and activist.

Born in 1948 and son of farm workers María de la Luz Quintana and Felipe Emilio Herrera, Juan Felipe Herrera lived from crop to crop and from tractor to trailer to tents on the roads of the San Joaquín Valley and the Salinas Valley.

Growing up in the '60s and attending college in the '70s during the Chicano Movement and more experimental writing such as the Beat Poets, writers like Luis Valdez and Allen Ginsberg inspired Herrera.

Ilan Stavans, a Mexican American essayist once said, "there is one constant in the past three decades in Chicano literature and his name is Juan Felipe Herrera.

[11] Herrera produced "The Twin Tower Songs," a San Joaquin Valley performance memorial on the September 11, 2001, attacks and writes (poetry sequences) for the PBS television series American Family.

His recent musical, The Upside Down Boy, was well received in New York City, produced by Making Books Sing, libretto by Barbara Zinn Krieger.

Mr. Herrera is a board member of the Before Columbus American Book Awards Foundation and the California Council for the Humanities.

On September 8, 2015, at the Library of Congress on the day that he was inducted as poet laureate, Herrera, the Chicago-Mexican son band Sones de Mexico, and their songwriting class, cowrote the ballad "Corrida de Sandra Bland", in Spanish, to honor the Chicago woman who had died in police custody in Texas.

The play, written by California State University, Stanislaus professor Arnold Anthony Schmidt and directed by Stefani Tsai, is based on "The Upside Down Boy," "Calling the Doves" and "Super Cilantro Girl."