Richard Blanco, award-winning poet and author, professor and public speaker, will spend an evening at Cal Poly on Tuesday, Feb. 27 as the keynote speaker for the Change the Status Quo Social Justice and Service Lecture Series.
The public is invited to attend the Cal Poly Center for Service in Action’s 22nd annual event, which seeks to empower attendees to use the university’s Learn by Doing spirit to challenge social norms, ask critical questions, demand solutions and make lasting social change.
The free event will include a reading, moderated discussion and question-and-answer session with Blanco, starting at 6 p.m. in Chumash Auditorium, in the University Union on campus.
Blanco was selected by then-President Barack Obama as the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet in U.S. history. He was the youngest and the first Latino, immigrant and gay person to serve in that role, reading “One Today,” an original poem he wrote for Obama’s inauguration ceremony in January 2013.
In 2023, Blanco was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Joe Biden. According to the National Endowment for the Humanities, “Blanco’s powerful storytelling challenges the boundaries of culture, gender and class while celebrating the promise of our nation’s highest ideals.”
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 his five collections of poetry. His work asks those universal questions we all ask ourselves on our own journeys: “Where am I from?” “Where do I belong?” “Who am I in this world?”
Blanco 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,” which is currently under development as a TV series. He currently serves as education ambassador for the Academy of American Poets and as the first-ever poet laureate of Miami-Dade County. He is an associate professor of English at Florida International University, his alma mater, where he earned both a Bachelor of Science in civil engineering and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing.
Cal Poly’s Center for Service in Action is committed to making this event accessible to all individuals. Anyone with an accessibility request can email [email protected]. For more information about the event, visit https://serviceinaction.calpoly.edu/CSQ.