Richard Blanco
Presidential Inaugural Poet
Civil Engineer, Author, Poet, Professor
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, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal from the NEH by President Biden. 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. In 2024 he chaired the National Book Awards panel for poetry. Blanco was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, has received numerous honorary doctorates, and 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, and 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 in development for 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 currently 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?
