This is Day 3 of our four-day festival! Photo credit: Curtis Messer
The 12th Annual San José Poetry Festival continues!
Join us in the Renzel Room inside History Park for an in-depth writing workshop with California Poet Laureate Lee Herrick. Pens and paper can be provided.
I've Been Here and Never Been Here: Writing Poems About Place and Displacement
How can our poems be rooted but also rootless so that they are grounded but also free? This workshop will explore strategies for writing poems that they are located in a place: a room, a city, someone's arms. From there, we will explore strategies for moving beyond the place into a sense of displacement or wonder. Bring your ideas for a poem about a place or a difficult or important experience or memory. To write creatively is transform an experience. It can be liberating. We will write a poem, have time to share, and leave with strategies and ideas to write more.
Folks can bring paper or a laptop or tablet. Ages 14+ welcome.
Our Workshop Facilitator
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.
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.