Juan Felipe Herrara, current poet laureate of the United States.
Juan Felipe Herrara recently announced his major Poet Laureate project, La Casa De Colores (The House of Colors), a public poetry project aimed at creating “an epic poem of all our voices and styles and experiences” made up of monthly submissions by citizen-poets. The project is intended to extend through the entirety of his Laureateship with a new theme for submissions announced each month. The first month’s theme is La Familia, and so we include some of the submissions in our special holiday podcast about Home and Family. Poet Laureates are appointed for a one-year term, but they typically accept the option of continuing for a second year.
Participation in La Casa De Colores is through a submission form on the Poet Laureate’s section of the Library of Congress website. To submit you must affirm you are at least 13 years old and agree that your writing may appear without attribution to you. You also agree to let your writing go immediately into the public domain. This doesn’t mean you can’t publish it yourself later, but it does mean that others can use it as well, a policy that makes it possible for us to include submissions in our podcast.
All of the first month submissions have been posted under the title “Family Words and Story Poems.”