Lee Herrick is California’s 10th Poet Laureate, and the first Asian American to serve in the role. A former Fresno Poet Laureate, Herrick’s work explores the diversity and vitality of the California experience. Born in Daejeon, South Korea and adopted as an infant, he writes eloquently on the immigrant experience – bringing to life the smell of chapchae and the sound of mariachi trumpets, the farmers market at midnight, and the small talk of Armenian neighbors. Herrick’s work is a Whitmanesque celebration of the best spirit of our state, the vibrancy of the Central Valley, and ourselves.

Every year Grace Cathedral chooses a theme to help provide focus and create new ways to grow as a community. In 2023, our theme is the Year of Poetry. During this year we will explore the walls that separate us from each other and the words that help connect us. 

Join Malcolm Clemens Young for a conversation with Herrick about poetry as a bridge to social justice, and its enduring power. 

The Forum will be posted on our Youtube and Apple Podcast channels.    

Watch

About the Guest

Lee Herrick is the California Poet Laureate. He is the author of three books of poems: Scar and Flower, finalist for the 2020 Northern California Book Award; Gardening Secrets of the Dead; and This Many Miles from Desire. He is co-editor of The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (Orison Books 2020). His poems appear widely, in The Poetry Foundation, Academy of American Poets, The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the San Francisco Bay Watershed, 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 Terrain.org and Sixteen Rivers Press. He co-founded LitHop in Fresno. He has taught in Qingdao, China, and for Kundiman. He was born in Daejeon, Korea and adopted as an infant. He lives with his family in Fresno, California and served as Fresno Poet Laureate from 2015-2017. He teaches at Fresno City College and in the low-residency MFA program at University of Nevada Reno at Lake Tahoe. He is the 10th California Poet Laureate, and the first Asian American to serve in the role. 

About the Moderator

The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young is the dean of Grace Cathedral. He is the author of The Spiritual Journal of Henry David Thoreau and The Invisible Hand in Wilderness: Economics, Ecology, and God, and is a regular contributor on religion to the Huffington Post and San Francisco Examiner.    

About The Forum

The Forum is a series of stimulating conversations about faith and ethics in relation to the important issues of our day. We invite inspiring and illustrious people to sit down for a real conversation with the Forum’s host and with you. Our guests range from artists, inventors, and philosophers to pop culturists and elected officials, but the point of The Forum is singular: civil, sophisticated discourse that engages minds and hearts to think in new ways about the world.  More about Grace Forum Online.

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