Richard Blanco è un poeta americano, gay dichiarato, chiamato ad intervenire alla cerimonia per l’insediamento del Presidente Obama nel 2013

Blanco immigrated to Miami with his Cuban exile family and was raised and educated there. He earned a B.S. from Florida International University in Civil Engineering in 1991 and his Master in Fine Arts in Creative Writing in 1997, where he studied with Campbell McGrath.

Since 1999, he traveled and lived in Guatemala and Brazil. He taught at Georgetown University, American University, and Central Connecticut State University.

He explored his Cuban heritage in his early works and his role as a gay man in Cuban-American culture in Looking for the Gulf Motel (2012). He explained: “It’s trying to understand how I fit between negotiating the world, between being mainstream gay and being Cuban gay.”

His work has appeared in The Nation, Ploughshares, Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, TriQuarterly Review, New England Review, and Americas Review. Blanco is part of the online Letras Latinas Oral History Project archives.

On January 8, 2013, he was named the inaugural poet for Barack Obama’s second inauguration, the fifth person to play that role. He is the first immigrant, first Latino, and first gay person to be inaugural poet. He is also the youngest.

He lives in Bethel, Maine with his partner.[3] In the poem “Queer Theory, According to My Grandmother,” he described how his grandmother warned him as a young boy: “For God’s sake, never pee sitting down…/I’ve seen you” and “Don’t stare at The Six-Million-Dollar Man./I’ve seen you.” and “Never dance alone in your room.”

When asked in a May 7, 2012, interview with La Bloga whether he considered himself a Cuban writer or simply a writer, Blanco responded: “I am a writer who happens to be Cuban, but I reserve the right to write about anything I want, not just my cultural identity. Aesthetically and politically, I don’t exclusively align myself with any one particular group—Latino, Cuban, gay, or ‘white’—but I embrace them all. Good writing is good writing. I like what I like.” (Wikipedia)