Juan Felipe Herrera is at the top of his game…He served as California’s Poet Laureate from 2012-2014, the first Latino poet to hold that post. He’s also the first Latino to be U.S. Poet Laureate. He’s the only child of migrant workers, and has five children of his own. He got his MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and comfortably straddles the line dividing poems of the page, and performance poetry, another useful qualification for his new job.

NPR reviews Juan Felipe Herrera’s Notes on the Assemblage and looks at how Herrera is able to capture “the poetry of the moment.”