My Poetry Corner January 2025 features the poem “Truths” from the poetry collection Scar and Flower (USA, 2019) by poet Lee Herrick, the first Asian American to serve as the tenth California Poet Laureate (2022-2024). Born in 1970 in Daejeon, South Korea, he was adopted at ten months old by an American couple. He grew up in Northern California where he attended Modesto Junior College and received his BA in English and MA in Composition and Rhetoric from the California State University, Stanislaus.

He lives with his wife and daughter in Fresno, Northern California, where he is an English professor at Fresno City College since 1997. He also teaches in the low-residency MFA program at the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe.

“Adoption is seen through Hollywood’s lens as purely and essentially as a blessing and a gift. Which in some way may be true, however adoption is also wrapped in trauma,” Herrick told Sara Ohler during an interview in May 2023 for The Rampage literary magazine.

Though blessed with a warm and loving family, he was struck with anxiety in 1989, during his senior year in high school and throughout most of college. Growing up among family members in the creative arts—his mother is a visual artist—he found relief in music and poetry. “You kind of just had to make do or things weren’t very helpful,” Herrick said. “‘Handle your business or be a man,’ so the arts and music was a great outlet for me.”