.
Selected by President Obama for his 2nd inauguration
(The Closet Professor) – The Presidential Inaugural Committee announced Richard Blanco, a Latino gay man and immigrant, will be the inaugural poet for the president’s swearing-in January 21. Blanco will be the youngest-ever inaugural poet, the first Latino, and the first LGBT person to read a poem at the inauguration, according to the committee’s announcement.
Blanco, who lives in Maine with his partner, told The New York Times he has long identified with numerous aspects of President Obama’s journey to prominence. From the moment Barack Obama burst onto the political scene, the poet Richard Blanco, a son of Cuban exiles, says he felt “a spiritual connection” with the man who would become the nation’s 44th president.
Like Obama, who chronicled his multicultural upbringing in a best-selling autobiography, “Dreams From My Father,” Blanco has been on a quest for personal identity through the written word. He said his affinity for Obama springs from his own feeling of straddling different worlds; he is Latino and gay (and worked as a civil engineer while pursuing poetry). His poems are laden with longing for the sights and smells of the land his parents left behind.
“Since the beginning of the campaign, I totally related to his life story and the way he speaks of his family, and of course his multicultural background,” Blanco, who was born to Cuban parents in Spain, then raised and educated in Miami, told the Times. “There has always been a spiritual connection in that sense. I feel in some ways that when I’m writing about my family, I’m writing about him.”
…
Blanco was conceived in Cuba, born in Spain and raised and educated in Miami, where his mother was a bank teller, his father a bookkeeper, and his grandmother — “abuela” in his poems — was a looming, powerful presence. Family folklore has it that he was named for Richard M. Nixon, his father’s favorite president, who took a strong stand against Fidel Castro.The Blanco home was a modest place where pork was served on Thanksgiving (in his first published poem, “América,” Blanco writes that he insisted one year on having turkey), and Latin music played on holidays and birthdays. Theirs was a world dominated by food and family, where “mango,” as Blanco writes in another poem, “Mango, Number 61,””was abuela and I hunched over the counter covered with the Spanish newspaper, devouring the dissected flesh of the fruit slithering like molten gold through our fingers.”
