Wednesday, April 15, 2026 | 6:30–8 p.m. (PT)
Poetry helps us explore who we are and how we connect to the world around us.
WeHo Reads: Poets Laureate Lee Herrick & Jen Cheng
Online Via Zoom and YouTube
Free, RSVP Requested
Join us this National Poetry Month for a conversation between California Poet Laureate Lee Herrick & West Hollywood City Poet Laureate Jen Cheng as they reflect on how language shapes identity, sparks imagination, and can build bridges between cultures and communities.
Featuring:
Lee Herrick is the 10th California Poet Laureate and the first Asian American to serve in the role. He is the author of four poetry collections, including In Praise of Late Wonder: New and Selected Poems (2024), and his work appears widely in major literary publications and anthologies. A former Fresno Poet Laureate, co-founder of LitHop, and longtime educator, Herrick teaches at Fresno City College and has been reappointed to a second term as California Poet Laureate.
Jen Cheng is the 5th West Hollywood City Poet Laureate and the author of Braided Spaces. A Poet Laureate Fellow with the Academy of American Poets and a California Arts Council Fellow, she merges multilingual and multicultural influences through her multidisciplinary practice known as Feng Shui Poetry. Cheng teaches with organizations including The Poetry Society of New York, The Loft Literary Center, and UCLA Extension.
WeHo Reads is a literary series presented by the City of West Hollywood. For more information and events, visit www.weho.org/wehoreads. The 2026 season is produced by BookSwell, a literary media company amplifying historically excluded voices. Additional support is provided by media partnerships with Book Soup and Los Angeles Review of Books. Attendees are advised that the program may include mature language and themes. . Attendees are advised that the program may include mature language and themes.
Poets Laureate
Lee Herrick
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, Naming the Lost: The Fresno Poets; Poetry Goes to the Movies; 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; at Kundiman in New York City, and for twelve years in the low-residency MFA program at University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe.
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. He is the 10th California Poet Laureate, and the first Asian American to serve in the role. In April 2025, he became the first California Poet Laureate to be officially reappointed to a second two-year term
Learn more at https://www.leeherrick.com.
Jen Cheng
Jen Cheng is the 5th West Hollywood City Poet Laureate and the author of Braided Spaces. A Poet Laureate Fellow with the Academy of American Poets and a California Arts Council Fellow, she merges multilingual and multicultural influences through her multidisciplinary practice known as Feng Shui Poetry. Cheng teaches with organizations including The Poetry Society of New York, The Loft Literary Center, and UCLA Extension.
Learn more at https://jencvoice.com.
