The Importance of Joy and Wonder: A California Poet's Journey
Lee Herrick
He is co-editor of The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (Orison Books 2020) and Afterlives: An AGNI Portfolio of Asian Adoptee Diaspora Writing. His poems appear widely, in The Poetry Foundation, Academy of American Poets, The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the San Francisco Bay Watershed, Naming the Lost: The Fresno Poets; Poetry Goes to the Movies; Indivisible: Poems of Social Justice with a foreword by Common, HERE: Poems for the Planet, with a foreword by the Dalai Lama, and Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, among others. Herrick serves on the advisory board of Terra in.org and Sixteen Rivers Press. He co-founded LitHop in Fresno. He has taught in Qingdao, China; at Kundiman in New York City, and for twelve years in the low-residency MFA program at University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe.
Herrick was born in Daejeon, Korea and adopted as an infant. He currently lives with his family in Fresno, California and served as Fresno Poet Laureate from 2015-2017. He teaches at Fresno City College. He is the 10th California Poet Laureate, and the first Asian American to serve in the role. In April 2025, he became the first California Poet Laureate to be officially reappointed to a second two-year term.
Lee Herrick's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Center for Writing and Public Discourse at CMC.