Left Bank Books Event – Richard Blanco

We are so pleased to welcome Richard back to Belfast. Selected by President Obama as the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet in U.S. history, Richard was the youngest, the first Latinx, immigrant, and gay person to serve in that role. In 2023, he 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, Richard’s personal negotiation of cultural identity and the universal themes of place and belonging characterize much of his work. His most recent collection, Homeland of My Body, reassesses traditional notions of home as strictly a geographical, tangible place that merely exists outside us, but rather, within us. Homeland is a rich, intensely intimate collection with two sections of new poems bookending Richard’s selections from his five previous volumes.

Richard has received numerous national and international awards and honorary degrees. Currently, he serves as Education Ambassador for The Academy of American Poets and is an Associate Professor at Florida International University. In 2022, he was appointed the first-ever Poet Laureate of Miami-Dade County.