(Wed) April 30, 2025, 6:00pm — 7:30pm
AC1-150
Join us for the 3rd Annual Willow Poetry Reading Series event at Clovis Community College! This event will feature a reading with award-winning poets and acclaimed writers Lee Herrick, Mai Der Vang, and Rajiv Mohabir. The event is free, open to the public, and will take place in the AC1-150 Lecture Hall on the Main Campus. Parking is free in student/unmarked stalls.
A reception with light refreshments will be hosted from 5:30 – 6 p.m. before the poetry reading. After the event, a book signing with the poets will take place from 7:30 – 8 p.m.
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, 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, and for Kundiman.
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 and in the low-residency MFA program at University of Nevada Reno at Lake Tahoe. He is the 10th California Poet Laureate, and the first Asian American to serve in the role.
Mai Der Vang is the author of Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an American Book Award, and a Northern California Book Award. Yellow Rain was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, PEN/Voelcker Award, the LA Times Book Prize, and the California Book Awards. Her first collection, Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017), received the First Book Award from the Academy of American Poets, was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry, and was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. A crucial turn to the ecological and generational impact of violence, Mai Der’s third collection Primordial (Graywolf Press, 2025) is a powerful and rousing meditation on climate, origin, and fate.
The recipient of a Guggenheim and Lannan Literary Fellowship, she served as a Visiting Writer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, Tin House, the American Poetry Review, among other journals and anthologies. Her essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, espnW, and elsewhere. Mai Der also co-edited How Do I Begin: A Hmong American Literary Anthology with the Hmong American Writers’ Circle. She completed residencies at Civitella Ranieri and Hedgebrook. Born and raised in Fresno, California, she earned degrees from the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University. Mai Der teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State.
Rajiv Mohabir is an Indo-Caribbean American author of five acclaimed poetry collections, The Taxidermist’s Cut, Cowherd’s Son, Cutlish, Whale Aria, and the forthcoming Seabeast; a book of translation, I Even Regret Night; and his hybrid memoir, Antiman. He is winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize, a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, finalists for the 2017 and 2022 Lambda Literary Awards, finalist for the 2022 PEN Open Book Award, the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award in Poetry. Mohabir has received fellowships from Voices of Our Nationʻs Artist foundation, Kundiman, The Home School, and the American Institute of Indian Studies language program. He received his MFA in Poetry and Translation from Queens College, CUNY and his PhD in English from the University of Hawai`i. Rajiv is currently a professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
For more information or questions, contact Professor Von Torres.
This event is sponsored by the English & Library Department; Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Workgroup; and 2024-2025 Action Plan funds from the CCC Department Chairs.
