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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, 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 have appeared widely in literary magazines, anthologies, and textbooks including The Poetry Foundation, Academy of American Poets, ZYZZYVA, Highway 99: A Literary Journey Through California’s Great Central Valley (2nd edition); The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the San Francisco Bay Watershed; Naming the Lost: The Fresno Poets—Interviews and Essays; One for the Money: The Sentence as Poetic Form; Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy; Indivisible: Poems of Social Justice with a foreword by Common; and HERE: Poems for the Planet with a foreword by the Dalai Lama, among others.  

Herrick served as Fresno Poet Laureate from 2015-2017. He serves on the advisory board of Terrain.org and Sixteen Rivers Press. He has taught in Qingdao, China, and for Kundiman in New York City. In 2016, he co-founded LitHop in Fresno. He attended Modesto Junior College and received his BA in English and MA in English from CSU Stanislaus.

He was born in Daejeon, South Korea and adopted at ten months old. He teaches at Fresno City College and in the low-residency MFA program at the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe. He is the 10th California Poet Laureate and the first Asian American to serve in the role.

B.A., M.A., California State University, Stanislaus