PROGRAM
“We head home: through the gloss of rain or weight / of snow, or the plum blush of dusk, but always—home, / always under one sky, our sky.”
Roosevelt House is proud to present a new event in our popular series, American Voices, this time celebrating the life and work of award-winning poet and memoirist Richard Blanco. This event follows on the popular success of previous American Voices symposia focused on iconic American artists such as Billie Holiday, Sonia Sanchez, Sandra Cisneros, and Sylvia Plath. Blanco will be in conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Vijay Seshadri.
On January 21, 2013, Richard Blanco stood on the West Front of the United States Capitol before an audience of one million people and recited his poem “One Today” as part of the second inauguration of President Barack Obama. Blanco was the youngest and the first Latinx, immigrant, and gay person to be selected for the role of inaugural poet, a role which had been previously filled by classic American writers such as Robert Frost and Maya Angelou. Ten years later, Blanco returned to The White House for another extraordinary distinction—to be awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Joe Biden.
How did Blanco become a poet to the presidents? His is an immigrant’s story. He was born in Madrid but grew up in Miami after his Cuban-exile family moved there when he was an infant. Growing up in a working-class family, he often struggled with personal identity and issues of place and belonging. He attended Florida International University, earning a BS in civil engineering, and, once he discovered his love of poetry, an MFA in creative writing. Since 1991, he has worked as both an engineer and a poet. He teaches at his alma matter.
His first poetry volume, City of a Hundred Fires, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. His second, Directions to the Beach of the Dead, received the Beyond Margins Award from the PEN American Center. His third, Looking for the Gulf Motel, was awarded the prestigious Paterson Poetry Prize. His latest volume is Homeland of My Body: New and Selected Poems. He is also the author of the memoirs The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood and For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet’s Journey.
The event will feature Blanco’s reflections on President Obama and his Inauguration Day experience, as well as his time with President Biden, in addition to readings from his work. Please join us at Roosevelt House for a unique evening of poetry and politics with a singular figure in contemporary American literature.
Vijay Seshadri was born in India and immigrated to America when he was five. He earned a BA from Oberlin College and an MFA from Columbia University. A former editor at The New Yorker and poetry editor at The Paris Review, he has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. His five books are Wild Kingdom; The Long Meadow; The Disappearances: New and Selected Poems; That Was Now, This Is Then; and 3 Sections. A professor at Sarah Lawrence College, he is the recipient of the James Laughlin Prize and the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
