A Conversation with Richard Blanco, National Humanities Medal Recipient

A Conversation with Richard Blanco, National Humanities Medal Recipient

Continuing Letras Latinas’ yearlong 20th anniversary series, in October 2024 Notre Dame welcomed visiting poets Richard Blanco and Rigoberto González. 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.


Richard was introduced by his longtime friend, special guest and fellow Miami poet Emma Trelles. Earlier in the day, Emma sat down with Richard for an oral history conversation. Listen in as they discuss the unexpected role of ambition in the creative process, how language can be a way of breathing in the world, and his continuous search for relevance as an elder in the poetry community.

Experience the Event

Presented by Institute for Latino Studies

Wednesday, November 27, 2024 12:00 pm

Continuing Letras Latinas’ yearlong 20th anniversary series, in October 2024 Notre Dame welcomed visiting poets Richard Blanco and Rigoberto González. 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.

Richard was introduced by his longtime friend, special guest and fellow Miami poet Emma Trelles. Earlier in the day, Emma sat down with Richard for an oral history conversation. Listen in as they discuss the unexpected role of ambition in the creative process, how language can be a way of breathing in the world, and his continuous search for relevance as an elder in the poetry community.

For more information, please visit the Letras Latinas website.

Enjoy this bonus Letras Latinas recording of an oral history conversation with Richard Blanco, interviewed by Letras Latinas director Francisco Aragón from 2007, six years before Richard served as the nation’s fifth-ever inaugural poet for Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration in January 2013.

Editor’s note: There were technical difficulties during this recording that affect the sound quality. We hope you enjoy the conversation nonetheless.

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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: 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.

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