Poetry & Conversation with Richard Blanco and Rigoberto González
Continuing Letras Latinas’ yearlong 20th anniversary series, in October 2024 Notre Dame welcomed visiting poets Richard Blanco and Rigoberto González, moderated by Susana Plotts-Pineda, Latino Poetry Fellow at the Library America. Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology was released in September 2024, and was edited by Rigoberto González, and includes the work of Richard Blanco.
Experience the Event
Presented by Institute for Latino Studies
Thursday, November 14, 2024 12:00 pm
Continuing Letras Latinas’ yearlong 20th anniversary series, in October 2024 Notre Dame welcomed visiting poets Richard Blanco and Rigoberto González, moderated by Susana Plotts-Pineda, Latino Poetry Fellow at the Library America. Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology was released in September 2024, and was edited by Rigoberto González, and includes the work of Richard Blanco.
Susana Plotts-Pineda says a few words about the ambitious Library of America project Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology. Richard Blanco is introduced by his longtime friend, special guest and fellow Miami poet Emma Trelles. Notre Dame MFA candidate Emiliano Gomez ’25 MFA introduces Rigoberto González, a fellow California native.
For more information, please visit the Letras Latinas website.
Meet the Poet: Richard Blanco
Richard Blanco was selected by President Barack Obama as the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet. In 2023, Blanco was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Joseph Biden from the National Endowment for the Humanities. 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 Blanco’s poetry, including his most recent, Homeland of My Body: New and Selected Poems. He 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. Blanco has received numerous awards, including the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize, the PEN American Beyond Margins Award, the Patterson Prize, and a Lambda Prize for memoir. He was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and has received numerous honorary degrees. Currently, he serves as Education Ambassador for the The Academy of American Poets and is an Associate Professor at Florida International University. In April 2022, Blanco was appointed the first-ever Poet Laureate of Miami-Dade County.
Meet the Poet: Rigoberto González
Rigoberto González is the author of eighteen books of poetry and prose. His awards include Lannan, Guggenheim, NEA, NYFA, and USA Rolón fellowships, the PEN/ Voelcker Award, the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Contributing editor for Poets & Writers, he is the series editor for the Camino del Sol Latinx Literary Series at the University of Arizona Press, and the editor of Latino Poetry: A Library of America Anthology. Currently, he’s Distinguished Professor of English and the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey.
Meet the Poet: Emiliano Gomez '25 MFA
Emiliano Gomez ’25 MFA is an MFA candidate at the University of Notre Dame. He reviews at the Cleveland Review of Books and has received grants from the California Arts Council. He used these grants to shadow farm workers and domestic workers, to learn from local Sikh and Nisenan and queer communities, to interview fire survivors, and to promote grassroots art. His deliberately transgressive convivial art has been published in, or is forthcoming from, wet grain, mercuryfirs, Indolent Books, Broadkill Review, ballast, and Action, Spectacle.
Meet the Poet: Susana Plotts-Pineda
Susana Plotts-Pineda is an artist and writer. Her writing has been featured in The New York Review of Books, Works and Days, Lana Turner, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Acentos Reviews. Her performances and film have shown at Performance Studies International, Beam Center’s The Lighthouse on Governor’s Island, and the Orange County Film Fiesta. She is currently the Latino Poetry Project Fellow at the Library of America. Her first book of poems, In Order to Extract a Memory it is Of Course Necessary to Build the Room is forthcoming with Futurepoem in 2026.
Meet the Poet: Emma Trelles
Emma Trelles is the 9th Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara (2021-23) and a 2023 recipient of an Established Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council. In August 2022, she was named one of 22 Poet Laureate Fellows across the country by the Academy of American Poets. The daughter of Cuban immigrants, she is the author of Tropicalia (University of Notre Dame Press), winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize and a finalist for Foreword-Indies poetry book of the year. She is writing a new collection of poems, Courage and the Clock. Her work is anthologized in Best American Poetry; Verse Daily; Best of the Net; Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity; To Give Life A Shape: Poems Inspired by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; and others. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Florida International University and has taught poetry and creative writing workshops in academic and community based settings such as the O, Miami Poetry Festival, the Sanibel Island Writers Conference, Santa Barbara City College, Antioch University-Santa Barbara, and the Pintura Palabra project at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum.
Emma has presented her work at venues across the country, including The Bryant Park Reading Room in New York, The Poet and the Poem series at the Library of Congress, Busboys & Poets in Washington D.C., the Miami Book Fair, the Ojai Art Center, the Milwaukee Public Library-Central Branch, the University of California-Santa Barbara, the Last Bookstore in Los Angeles, the University of Notre Dame, and the Palabra Pura series at the Guild Literary Complex in Chicago.
She is a CantoMundo Fellow and the recipient of an Individual Artist Grant from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs. Emma was born and raised in Miami, and after working for many years in South Florida as an arts and culture journalist, she now lives with her husband in California, where she curates the Mission Poetry Series. She is the series editor of the Alta California Chapbook Prize from Gunpowder Press, open to Latina/e/o/x poets who reside in the U.S. and published in bilingual editions in the spring.