This is Day 3 of our four-day festival! Photo credit: Curtis Messer
The 12th Annual San José Poetry Festival continues!
Join us in front of Markham House inside History Park for readings by California Poet Laureate Lee Herrick, Brandon Luu and Solange Aguilar.
Ticket info to come.
Our Featured Poets
Photo credit: Mark Tabay
Lee Herrick is the California Poet Laureate. He is the author of four books of poems: In Praise of Late Wonder: New and Selected Poems (Gunpowder Press, September 2024); 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) 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 Terrain.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.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. 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.
Solange Aguilar (They/Ze) is an award-winning queer Mescalero Apache, Yo'eme, and Filipinx (Kapampángan) multimedia artist, poet, zinemaker, and author of Red Like Earth. They are a 2025 Jack McCarthy Book Prize winner with Write Bloody Publishing, a co-winner of the Corazón de Oro from Raíces for their work on the Mispu Story Signs at Santa Barbara City College, and a first place winner in the Santa Barbara Poetry Slam. They're also a recipient of The Pachamama Skillshare and Women's Creative Collective for Change artist scholarship and a 2021 fellow from the Artist2Artist program by the Art Matters Foundation. Their work has been featured in News from Native California, Earth First! Journal, at The Getty, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, and in Harvard Library's zine collection.
Brandon Luu is a poet from San Jose, California. He received his Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from San Jose State University, and he is a member of the Board of Directors of Poetry Center San Jose. He also served as a 2022 Creative Ambassador for the City of San Jose. For him, poetry is an opportunity to bring people together, regardless of age or circumstance. "Through language, we attempt to make sense of the human condition, and from there, we begin to understand each other."
Poetry Center San José's mission is to nurture and promote diverse literary expression in our community as a means of exploring, defining, and enriching the human experience.