Herrera taught creative writing, poetry writing, Chicano/Latino literature, and expository writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago; the
University of New Mexico–Los Alamos; South Bay College,
Hawthorne, California; and
Russell Sage College,
Troy, New York. She is a member of the
Community of Writers at Squaw Valley,
California, and is the founder of the Writing Studio, Medusa Community of Poets & Writers, and the Audre Lorde Poetry Prize at
Russell Sage College. Currently she is a member of the
Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies and serves as the poetry editor for their journal,
HaLapid. Herrera descends from
Crypto-Jews, also known as
Conversos. These converts to Catholicism escaped the
Spanish Inquisition for the
New World where they intermarried with the indigenous peoples and old Christians who populated the
American Southwest. Her poetry collection,
Kaddish for Columbus explores the enigma of these divergent identities and landscapes the poet inhabits: ==Publications==