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Juan Felipe Herrera's "Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems" has been named one of five poetry finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Juan Felipe Herrera's "Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems" has been named one of five poetry finalists in the highly-competitive National Book Critics Circle Awards.

The 2009 winners will be announced at an awards ceremony on March 12 at the New School in New York City.

The National Book Critics Circle, founded in 1974, is a nonprofit organization consisting of more than 900 active book reviewers who are interested in honoring quality writing and communicating with one another about common concerns.

The centerpiece of NBCC activities is the annual awards for the best book in six categories: autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction and poetry. First presented in 1975, the book award has been bestowed on such authors as Vladimir Nabokov, Toni Morrison, John Irving and Robert Penn Warren.

Since its publication in July 2008, Herrera's "Half of the World in Light" has received critical acclaim from reviewers across the nation.

In the New York Times Book Review, critic Stephen Burt praised Herrera's contribution to American letters: "Many poets since the 1960s have dreamed of a new hybrid art, part oral, part written, part English, part something else: an art grounded in ethnic identity, fueled by collective pride, yet irreducibly individual too. Many poets have tried to create such an art: Herrera is one of the first to succeed."

For nearly four decades, Juan Felipe Herrera has documented his experience as a Chicano in the United States and Latin America through stunning, memorable poetry that is both personal and universal in its impact, themes, and approach.

Often political, never fainthearted, his career has been marked by tremendous virtuosity and a unique sensibility for uncovering the unknown and the unexpected. Herrera holds the Tomás Rivera Endowed chair in the department of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.

For the last 35 years, Juan Felipe has been writing, publishing, reading, performing, leading workshops and organizing literary broadsides, journals and publications in home communities and universities in California and throughout the nation. He is the author of 24 books, and he has more than 100 articles, poems, reviews, and essays in print.