Richard Blanco’s trailblazing poetry examines elements of identity, self-exploration, politics, history, social justice, and more, but there is one clear common denominator in his collections: reflections on the nature of home. Born in Madrid to Cuban exile parents, Blanco relocated to the United States at just 45 days old, and thus his contemplations of home have their roots in specific and personal experiences. “I wasn’t a legal citizen of any country until I was 17 years old,” he reminds his audiences. However, his writing stretches beyond the literal definitions of “home,” examining the emotional resonance of the term, its relationship with personal safety and sense of belonging, and the geopolitical implications of the concept in communities, the nation, and the globe. It’s his ability to seamlessly mesh the personal with the universal in his work, to pump specific and human life into the generalities and abstractions of politics, and his eagerness to, as he says, offer his writing as “a vehicle for civic engagement” that have cemented Blanco’s place amongst the change-making poets in American history. 

Raised in a tight-knit and multilingual working class community in Miami, Blanco’s immersion in two languages, Spanish and English, helped forge a relationship with language that has informed his adult life. “I don’t remember a time when I didn’t speak two languages,” Blanco says. “I was the first one, effectively, to learn English in my family. . . . I understood really early that language was not just to communicate; language was power, language was a way of thinking about the world, a way of breathing in the world.” However, while he was always drawn toward creative expression, Blanco’s initial career path was not in the humanities. He graduated from Florida International University (F.I.U.) with a degree in civil engineering, and his first job was as an engineer in Miami. He was intellectually engaged in the work, but he found himself sketching poems as a creative outlet for a field dictated by cold practicality in its language. However, finding his authentic creative voice would take time. As a student, Blanco had had limited exposure to poetry that spoke to his experiences as an immigrant, as a Cuban American, and as a gay man. “My sense of poetry was very archaic,” Blanco recalls. “I’m like 25 or 26 at the time, so all I remembered was the high school poetry of all the dead white guys. That’s what we were taught back then.”

The reading of Mexican-American writer Sandra Cisneros’s novel The House on Mango Street opened Blanco’s eyes to a broader sense of possibility in his writing. “I read that book and was like, ‘What!? I can do this? I get to tell my story? This is what poetry is? This is what literature is?’” Meeting Cisneros herself shortly thereafter only helped solidify Blanco’s belief in a creative voice rooted in his own experiences, and as his poetry became increasingly personal, he found himself delving more deeply into the intersections of the various elements of his identity. Blanco maintains a friendship with Cisneros to this day, and he notes, “She still continues to inspire me!” Graduate work in creative writing at F.I.U., where he was mentored by poet and faculty member Campbell McGrath, fine tuned his skills, but it was a particularly pertinent prompt from McGrath that Blanco recalls as a true jumping off point for his poetry. “The assignment was to write a poem about America, and that prompt opened up a flood gate of questions that I didn’t even know I had about life, belonging, identity. The result of that prompt became the very first poem in my first book, and I was off.” Blanco recalls how his work with McGrath “made me dig into the core of human emotions of particular experiences, so that I wasn’t just reporting, but rather getting into those feelings of dislocation, displacement, and belonging that we all have regardless of where we’re from or who we are.”  

With his poetry career ascending and already the author of three acclaimed collections of poetry by the end of 2012 —  City of a Hundred Fires (1998), Directions to the Beach of the Dead (2005), and Looking for the Gulf Motel (2012)  — Blanco burst into the national consciousness when he was selected as the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet by Barack Obama. When he shared his poem “One Today” with a rapt national audience at the presidential inauguration in January 2013, he became the first Latinx, immigrant, and gay individual to serve in the role, not to mention the youngest poet to receive the honor. The exposure from the role not only heightened public awareness of Blanco’s previous work, which is rich in explorations of his own cultural identity, his relationships with Cuba and the United States, as well as his sexuality, it also broadened the focus of some of his writing. “Much of my earlier work was much more autobiographically centered, and I . .  didn’t write as overtly about certain social/political issues,” recalls Blanco. “Part of my growth as an artist was the life-changing moment of being the presidential inaugural poet and better understanding the role poetry can serve in our society.”

In his subsequent collections, How To Love a Country (2019) and Homeland of My Body: New and Selected Poems (2024), Blanco continued his own personal exploration of familiar themes but also found himself crafting more poems in response to current events and political discourse. “One of the most surprising things after the presidential inauguration was the tens of thousands of people who wrote to me, saying how they finally felt part of this country because of what I represented. Because of that poem, they finally felt heard.” His poem “Matters of the Sea” was commissioned to be read upon the reopening of the United States embassy in Havana in 2015, a fitting event for a poet grappling with the union of the two nations and cultures in his own life. He also increased his visibility as a voice for the LGBTQ community. “Let There Be Pride” was commissioned by Sam Adams for Pride Month in 2021, and he dedicated “Until We Could,” a poem addressing the struggle for marriage equality, to his partner of over twenty-five  years, Mark Neveu. Blanco also responded to the horrors of gun violence in poems such as “One Pulse— One Poem,” inspired by the 2016 mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, and “17 Funerals,” a lament on the loss of seventeen students killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. His poem “Como Tu/Like You/Like Me,” from which the quotation on the Robert Shetterly portrait is taken, addresses the Trump administration’s 2017 decision to repeal D.A.C.A (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and reminds the audience that human beings, including innocent children, carry the burden of political decisions. “That poem was a response to those questions of belonging, wondering if I belong to this narrative of the United States,” Blanco recalls. “And the poem is a response in the affirmative, saying, ‘Yes, I belong. We all belong.’ As our motto says, ‘Out of the many, one.’ Are we there yet? Hell no. But democracy is a verb, not a noun. One does not simply have democracy; one works at a democracy all one’s life.”

The nature of American democracy and the nation’s broader national identity are frequently at the forefront of Blanco’s mind. While he has never shied away from pulling back the curtain on the injustices and darker chapters in the American experience, he maintains a keen sense of optimism about the nation’s possibilities. His experience as an immigrant and child of Cuban exiles heavily informs that world view. “I’ve always said my parents were more American than I could ever be due to that leap of faith that they took, and the faith that they had in the ideals of our democracy.” He continues, “As a child of immigrants, I have always been instilled with a deep sense of patriotism for this country, and for the democratic ideals for which it stands and the promises it offers for a better society and a better world.”

Blanco’s poetry has earned the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, the PEN/Beyond Margins Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and more. He was named First Education Ambassador by the Academy of American Poets, honored with a Carnegie Corporation Great Immigrants Award, listed as one of “104 Champions of Pride” by Advocate Magazine, and, in 2023, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Joe Biden. In addition to his poetry, Blanco has produced two award-winning memoirs, For All Of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet’s Journey (2013) and The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood (2014), as well as a play co-authored with Vanessa Garcia called Sweet Goats and Blueberry Senoritas (2023). He also believes fully in breaking down barriers of access to poetry as an educator and public voice, ensuring future writers see a diversity of identities, voices, experiences, and styles in their reading. He is a faculty member at his alma mater, F.I.U., and teaches throughout the country in various workshops and events. “The humanities are not just to be locked up in the ivory tower; the humanities can do something real for people,” he says, adding, “I’m not quite so naive to think that poetry can change the world on its own, but I know that poetry can change one life. And that one life can change the world.”