Born in Madrid to Cuban exile parents and raised in Miami, Richard Blanco’s poetry is all about the negotiation of cultural identity and the universal themes of place.
Selected by President Obama as the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet in U.S. history, Blanco was the youngest, the first Latinx, immigrant, and gay person to serve in that role. In 2023, Blanco was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Biden from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Blanco’s most recent poetry collection, Homeland of My Body, which he will read from this evening, reassess traditional notions of home as strictly a geographical, tangible place that merely exist outside us, but rather, within us.
DOORS OPEN 6:00 PM
Artists & Authors
Venue
Awarded the National Humanities Medal and selected as the 5th U.S. Presidential Inaugural Poet, Richard Blanco, author of Homeland of My Body and How to Love a Country, will present a one-hour workshop with an exercise on the “golden rule” of poetry writing: Show, don’t tell.
Richard Blanco is many things: author, poet, playright, recipient of 2021 National Humanities Medal, professor, Woodrow Wilson Fellow, Education Ambassador for The Academy of American Poets, Poet Laureate of Miami-Dade County, Cuban-American, Floridian, Down-Easter. And he will bring all of these things in the melting pot that is himself when he reads and speaks, as part of Festival Boca’s Authors & Ideas series, on March 7.