Lee Herrick is the author of This Many Miles from Desire (WordTech Editions, 2007). He has been involved in the Fresno poetry scene for many years as a poet, teacher, magazine and book publisher, and poetry event organizer. For 13 years he has edited and published In the Grove, a magazine for California Poets and Writers (http://inthegrove.net/) The magazine recently converted from a print to an on-line format. Under the In the Grove imprint, Herrick also published several volumes of poetry by California poets. He has also served as guest editor of New Truths: Writing in the 21st Century by Korean Adoptees. He currently serves on the board of directors for the Journal of Korean Adoption Studies.
Born in Daejeon, South Korea in 1970, Herrick was adopted by an American family at ten months and grew up in Danville (East Bay) and Modesto, California. He attended Modesto Junior College and then CSU Stanislaus where he earned a BA in English and an MA in Composition and Rhetoric. He currently teaches literature, composition, and poetry writing at Fresno City College where he also serves as Composition Department Chair. He is the proud father of a five year old daughter.
Before beginning his teaching career, Herrick worked as a busboy, waiter, pizza delivery driver, and baseball card store employee. He has traveled extensively throughout Latin America and Asia, backpacking through El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Belize, Peru, Bolivia, Cambodia, Thailand, South Korea, China, Viet Nam, and Laos. He has given readings at venues in Korea and across the United States, including New York City, Chicago, Minneapolis, El Paso, Los Angeles, Fresno, Berkeley, and San Francisco.
Herrick is currently at work on a second poetry manuscript entitled Bone Echo. His poems have appeared in publications including: zyzzyva, Many Mountains Moving, The Bloomsbury Review, Midwest Poetry Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, and Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, and also in the new anthology, The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the San Francisco Bay Watershed, Foreword by Robert Hass (Sixteen Rivers Press). He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, was a finalist for a Los Angeles Poetry Festival award, and was an Audience Choice Nominee at the Asian American Writers Workshop.
In addition to poetry, Herrick has written essays that have been published in textbooks such as Visions Across the Americas and in magazines such as the Korean Quarterly. He has been a guest blogger for “Letras Latinas.”
For more information about Lee Herrick and examples of his poems, see his website: http://leeherrick.com
