US Poet Laureate Talks Language, Beauty With UW-Milwaukee Students

U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera visited Wisconsin this week, telling an audience at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee that he aims to promote their “beautiful voices.”

Herrera, the country’s first Latino poet laureate, said his third grade teacher changed his life when she told him he had a beautiful voice. Until then, teachers had forbidden him from speaking his native Spanish.

Herrera asked the audience to keep speaking their languages.

“Let us embrace all of our languages, all of our words,” he said. “You know there’s always words we don’t want to use, we put them in prison. And you know how much we’re pushed to just speak one language. We all have many languages in our families, in our ancestors.”

Herrera spent two days meeting with UW-Milwaukee students and local poets.