Richard Blanco
| Richard Blanco | |
|---|---|
Richard Blanco, 2013
|
|
| Born | Richard Blanco February 15, 1968 Madrid, Spain |
| Occupation | Poet, Public Speaker, Civil Engineer, Teacher, Memoirist |
| Ethnicity | Cuban American |
| Citizenship | American |
| Alma mater | Florida International University |
| Notable works | "One Today" The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet's Journey Until We Could Film Looking for the Gulf Motel Directions to the Beach of the Dead City of a Hundred Fires Nowhere but Here Boston Strong: The Poem |
Richard Blanco (born February 15, 1968) is an American poet, public speaker, author and civil engineer. He is the fifth poet to read at a United States presidential inauguration, having read for Barack Obama's second inauguration. He is the first immigrant, the first Latino, the first openly gay person and the youngest person to be the U.S. inaugural poet.
Blanco, born in Madrid on February 15, 1968, immigrated as an infant with his Cuban exile family to Miami, and was raised and educated there. He earned a B.S. from Florida International University in Civil Engineering in 1991 and his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in 1997, where he studied with Campbell McGrath.
Since 1999, he has traveled and lived in Guatemala and Brazil. He taught at Georgetown University, American University, Central Connecticut State University, and Writer's Center. Blanco is a member of the prestigious Macondo Writers Workshop, the workshop founded by Sandra Cisneros.
He explored his Cuban heritage in his early works and his role as a gay man in Cuban-American culture in Looking for the Gulf Motel (2012). He explained: "It's trying to understand how I fit between negotiating the world, between being mainstream gay and being Cuban gay." According to Time magazine, he "views the more conservative, hard-line exile cohort of his parents' generation ... with a skeptical eye."John Dolan was critical of his style, calling his work "pure identity poetics, unsullied by one single stray thought or original turn of phrase."
His work has appeared in The Nation, Ploughshares,Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, TriQuarterly Review, New England Review, and Americas Review. Blanco is part of the online Letras Latinas Oral History Project archives.
...
Wikipedia