Juan Felipe Herrera is the 21st Poet Laureate of the United State (2015-2016) and is the first Latino to hold the position. From 2012-2014, Herrera served as California State Poet Laureate. Herrera’s many collections of poetry include Notes on the Assemblage; Senegal Taxi; Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems, a recipient of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross The Border: Undocuments 1971-2007. He is also the author of Crashboomlove: A Novel in Verse, which received the Americas Award. His books of prose for children include: SkateFate, Calling The Doves, which won the Ezra Jack Keats Award; Upside Down Boy; and Cinnamon Girl: Letters Found Inside a Cereal Box. Herrera is also a performance artist and activist on behalf of migrant and indigenous communities and at-risk youth.

Tom Lutz is the founding editor in chief of Los Angeles Review of Books and the author of Crying, Doing Nothing, and the forthcoming Wanderlust: Around the World in 80 Anecdotes.

Juan Felipe Herrera is the current California Poet Laureate and an award-winning writer and teacher in the Creative Writing Department at UC Riverside. He has published numerous volumes of poetry, prose, theater, children’s books, and young adult novels, including Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems, which received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award, the International Latino Award in poetry, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council, and the UC Berkeley Regent’s Fellowship. His most recent work is Senegal Taxi.

Marisa Urrutia Gedney, writer and educator, is a native Angeleno and was recently named one of Forbes Magazine's top 30 under 30 in Education. She is currently the Director of Programming for 826LA where she helps students write and publish their stories.

Freddy Lopez is a poet, writer, rapper, and performer from East Palo Alto. He is currently an undergraduate at U.C. Riverside, where he was recently in the case of the play Stars of Juarez, written by Juan Felipe Herrera. Lopez co-founded a self-expression organization called Art of the P.O.O.R. His future goals include becoming a professional rapper-poet-guitarist-performer, an education revolutionary, and starting a center for self-expression in his hometown.