Author of the week: Richard Blanco

last updated 8 January 2015

On Jan. 21, Richard Blanco will become a man of many firsts, said Renee Montagne in NPR.org. The 44-year-old son of Cuban exiles has been charged with composing an original poem to read at President Obama’s second swearing-in ceremonies, making him the first Latino, the first gay man, and the youngest writer to fill the role of “inaugural poet.” There have been only four previously, including Robert Frost, in 1961, and Maya Angelou, in 1993. “I’m beyond beside myself,” says Blanco, whose parents named him after Richard Nixon. Though he admits that writing a suitably meaningful new poem is “a very difficult assignment,” he’s not intimidated. “Writing about America is a topic that obsesses me. So it wasn’t completely unfamiliar.”

Blanco also identifies easily with Obama, said Sheryl Gay Stolberg in The New York Times.“Since the beginning of the [2008] campaign, I totally related to his life story and the way he speaks about his multi-cultural background,” he says. “I feel in some ways that when I’m writing about my family, I’m writing about him.” The poet jokingly refers to himself as “made in Cuba, assembled in Spain, and imported to the United States,” since his pregnant mother had to travel to Spain in order to legally immigrate to America. The challenge of negotiating the various facets of his identity has informed much of his work. “This whole idea of place and identity,” he says, is “such an American question that we’ve been asking it since, you know, since Whitman.”