Richard Blanco
Illuminating Poetry for Everyone
“An engineer, poet, Cuban American… his poetry bridges cultures and languages – a mosaic of our past, our present, and our future – reflecting a nation that is hectic, colorful, and still becoming.”
– President Joe Biden, conferring the National Humanities Medal on Richard Blanco
Homeland Of My Body: New & Selected Poems
Beacon Press, Release date: October 24, 2023.
A rich, accomplished, intensely intimate collection with two full sections of new poems bookending Blanco’s selections from his five previous volumes.
In this collection of over 100 poems, Richard Blanco has carefully selected poems from his previous books that represent his evolution as a writer grappling with his identity, working to find and define “home,” and bookended them with new poems that address those issues from a fresh, more mature perspective, allowing him to approach surrendering the pain and urgency of his past explorations. Pausing at this pivotal moment in mid-career, Blanco reexamines his life-long quest to find his proverbial home and all that it encompasses: love, family, identity and ultimately art itself. In the closing section of the volume, he has come to understand and internalize the idea that “home” is not one place, not one thing, and lives both inside him and inside his art.
Upcoming Events
September 26, 2026
The Jersey City Poetry Festival with Headlining Poet Richard Blanco
Jersey City, N.J.
More info>>
October 3, 2026
Florida State Poets Association
Sanford, F.L.
More info>>
Latest News
Richard Blanco Reads Elizabeth Bishop
Few poets have stayed with me as long—or as deeply—as Elizabeth Bishop.
You can imagine my excitement to join Kevin Young on The New Yorker Podcast to read and reflect on Bishop’s poem, “Questions of Travel.”
Inspired by the years she spent living in Brazil, the poem speaks to one of the central questions that shapes my own work: What is home? How do we belong—to the landscapes we inhabit, the language we inherit, and one another? Our conversation explores the ways travel and language shape us—and how translation, in all its forms, becomes a way of understanding ourselves and each other.
I also had the chance to read my poem “My Father in English”—first published in The New Yorker—and to talk about how it came to me almost in a single breath. I remember translating for my parents when I was just five years old. Language became power, but it also became a way of fathoming love, sacrifice, and inheritance.
Thank you to Kevin for creating such a generous space for conversation, and for his enduring devotion to poetry and the meaningful questions it invites us to ask.
You can listen on The New Yorker’s website or wherever you get your podcasts.
“One Today” at the Obama Presidential Center
More than a decade after reading my poem “One Today” at President Obama’s second inauguration, I was deeply moved—even brought to tears—to see the poem installed as part of the Power of Words exhibit at the Obama Presidential Center.
Poetry has given me many unexpected gifts over the years. This is one I’ll never forget.
Grand Opening of the Obama Presidential Center
“This is not goodbye, this is hello. It is the start…”
I’m honored to share this glimpse of President Obama speaking at the grand opening reception of the Obama Presidential Center. More than a decade after reading “One Today” at President Obama’s second inauguration, and after serving for more than a decade on the Obama Foundation’s Storytelling Council, it was especially meaningful to witness this vision become a reality.
The opening of the Center marks the beginning of a new chapter—one rooted in the enduring values of democracy, community, and public service. More than a museum, the Center invites us into an ongoing conversation about civic engagement, community, and the power of our individual and collective stories.
Grateful to everyone whose dedication, imagination, and belief helped bring this extraordinary vision to life.
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