Lee Herrick is a professor, world traveler and poet, having written about Latin America,
Hurricane Katrina, and a coffee date between Van Gogh and Ho Chi Minh. Despite the
various subjects and influences in his work, which even reference Janis Joplin and Bob
Marley, to some readers he is conveniently described as a "Korean American Adoptee."
While other writers might bristle at such specificity, the label, Korean American Adoptee
Poet, does not limit Herrick. In a way, it's an identity that draws him into a community, one
formed by shared experience. After all, Herrick was born in Seoul, adopted at 10 months,
and grew up in the East Bay area in California.
The personal stories of adoptees may not be identical, but there is another kind of kinship at
work. It's fitting that Herrick is drawn to poetry as an art form because it balances, as he
says, "precision as well as ambiguity and mystery, music and place, the idea that not all the
answers are needed; there is room for wondering in a poem."
Absence and silence, even in his so-called adoptee poems, do not merely describe loss and
abandonment. This seemingly empty space is where fellow adoptees can meet and create
their own meaning, communal as well as individual.
He's also recently published a book of poetry, This Many Miles from Desire (WordTech
Editions, 2007), and his work has appeared in the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal,
Berkeley Poetry Review, The Bloomsbury Review, as well as others. He's been nominated
for a Pushcart Prize and was a 2000 Los Angeles Poetry Festival Award finalist. 
In life and art, Herrick says he "strives for transcendence."
"There are traumatic human experiences," he says. "Poetry, for me, mitigates them to some
extent and reminds us that beauty is everywhere."
Maybe it's because he's been teaching for the last 15 years, actively engaging his students,
or maybe it's because he travels the world over, meeting individuals and listening to their
stories, but he doesn't just write for his own psychic healing. It would be simplistic to say
he writes in reaction to his past, but what is undeniable is the human connection that
Herrick values, even, and especially, as a poet who writes in solitude. 
Herrick has written his poems in various parts of the world - Peru, Guatemala, Mexico,
China, Korea, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. Notions of travel and place flow
naturally through his work.
"My view of poetry as a global and simultaneously personal experience is surely
connect[ed] to my adoption," he says. "I think that international travel has been so fulfilling
partly because I feel at home almost everywhere I go - at least in Latin America and Asia.
That's not to say racism does not exist - of course it does, and of course I have
experienced it in many serious ways - or that language barriers aren't sometimes a
challenge.
"I simply find beauty and love everywhere. I also find suffering everywhere. But I do not
separate the two. Instead, I've begun to appreciate the human experiences of joy and
suffering as just that - inseparable qualities of the human experience, and I love learning
about it in various parts of the world. Poetry is how I make sense of the joy and suffering."
For Herrick, poetry is about the communion that is possible between writer and reader. "I
tell my students that a poem is not a court deposition," he says. "The idea here is freedom.
It also liberated me, as an adoptee poet, because so much of what we learn about writing is
based on the old 'write what you know' advice, but when the adoptee doesn't know many
of the facts of his or her birth or early years, that ambiguity can be paralyzing for a writer."
His hope, he says, is for his poems to resonate with fellow adoptees, though not as some
sort of directive from on high.
"If there is someone out there for whom suffering is particularly acute, I think that poetry
- and perhaps even something in my poetry - can tether a person to the world," he says.
"If there is a Korean adoptee out there experiencing some unpleasant parts of life, I'd like
to think that he or she could find solace in the world - and strangely, my book has become
a small part of this world, and for that I am grateful."