Richard Blanco

National Humanities Medal Recipient
President Obama's Inaugural Poet 2013
Lambda Literary Award for Memoir

Readings &
Lecture Topics
  • Poetry of Identity and Place
  • American Boundaries: Race and Immigration
  • Poetry in Exile: Real & Imagined Homelands
  • The Intersection of Sexual & Cultural Identities
  • The Civic Role of Poetry: For, By & Of the People
  • Poet-Engineer: Writing Bridges/Building Poems
  • Memoir as Mirror: Writing Your Universal Story
  • Teaching Poetry Like a Poet: For Educators
  • Poet-In-Residence Program

Biography

“An engineer, poet, Cuban American, Richard Blanco’s poetry bridges cultures and languages—a mosaic of our past, our present, and our future—reflecting a nation that is hectic, colorful, and still becoming.”—President Joe Biden, conferring the National Humanities Medal on Richard Blanco, 2023

“A masterful poet who is clear-eyed and full of heart, Blanco explores the country’s haunted past while offering a bright hope for the future.” —Ada Limón

“Blanco’s poems are journeys to a homeland within the heart, a welcome homecoming earned from a lifetime’s wise voyaging.”—Sandra Cisneros

“Richard Blanco writes about the elusive poundingness of love.”—Eileen Myles

Selected by President Obama as the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet in U.S. history, Richard Blanco was the youngest, the first Latinx, immigrant, and gay person to serve in that a role. In 2023, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal from the NEH by President Biden. Blanco was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and has received numerous honorary doctorates. He currently severs as the first-ever Education Ambassador for the Academy of American and was appointed the first-ever poet laureate of Miami Dade County. Blanco has taught at Georgetown University, American University, and Wesleyan University. He is currently an Associate Professor of English at Florida International University, his alma mater, where he earned both a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing.

Born in Madrid to Cuban exile parents and raised in Miami in a working-class family, Blanco’s personal negotiation of cultural identity and the universal themes of place and belonging characterize his five collections of poetry: City of a Hundred Fires (recipient of the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press; Directions to The Beach of the Dead (recipient of the Beyond Margins Award from the PEN American Center); Looking for The Gulf Motel (recipient of the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award); How To Love a Country, his most recent book, Homeland of My Body: New & Selected Poems. Blanco has also authored the memoirs For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet’s Journey and The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood, which is currently under development as a TV series. Exploring other genres, with Vanessa Garcia, Blanco cowrote the play Sweet Goats & Blueberry Señoritas, which premiered at Portland Stage. He is also co-lyrist for Waiting for Snow in Havana, a musical in development.

As a civically engaged author, Blanco has written occasional poems for organizations and events including the reopening of the US Embassy in Cuba, Freedom to Marry, the Tech Awards of Silicon Valley, and the Boston Strong benefit concert following the Boston Marathon bombings. Nationally as well as internationally, Blanco lends his art and voice to advocate for diversity, LGBTQ rights, immigration rights, and arts education. Whether speaking as the Cuban Blanco or the American Richard, the homebody or the world traveler, the shy boy or the openly gay man, the engineer or the presidential inaugural poet, Blanco’s writings possess a story-rich quality that illuminates the human spirit. His work asks those universal questions we all ask ourselves on our own journeys: Where am I from? Where do I belong? Who am I in this world?

Short Bio

Selected by President Obama as the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet in U.S. history, Richard 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. Born in Madrid to Cuban exile parents and raised in Miami in a working-class family, Blanco’s personal negotiation of cultural identity and the universal themes of place and belonging characterize Blanco’s many collections of poetry, including his most recent, Homeland of My Body, which reassess traditional notions of home as strictly a geographical, tangible place that merely exist outside us, but rather, within us. He has also authored the memoirs For All Of Us: One Today: An Inaugural Poet’s Journey and The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Chldhood. Blanco has received numerous awards, including the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize, the PEN American Beyond Margins Award, the Patterson Prize, and a Lambda Prize for memoir. He was Woodrow Wilson Fellow and has received numerous honorary degrees. Currently, he serves as Education Ambassador for The Academy of American Poets and is an Associate Professor at Florida International University. In April 2022, Blanco was appointed the first-ever Poet Laureate of Miami-Dade County.

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