Selected by President Obama as the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet in U.S. history, Richard Blanco was the youngest, the first Latinx, immigrant, and gay person to serve in that role. In 2023, Blanco was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Biden from the National Endowment for the Humanities. 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 Blanco’s many collections of poetry, including his most recent, Homeland of My Body, which reassess traditional notions of home as strictly a geographical, tangible place that merely exist outside us, but rather, within us. He 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. Blanco has received numerous awards, including the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize, the PEN American Beyond Margins Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and a Lambda Prize for memoir. He was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and has received numerous honorary degrees. Currently, he serves as Education Ambassador for The Academy of American Poets and is an Associate Professor at Florida International University. In April 2022, Blanco was appointed the first-ever Poet Laureate of Miami-Dade County.

Join us as The Poetry Center celebrates the publication launch of the winning book for the 2025 Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award with a reading by the winning poet and some finalists. The 2025 winner is Terry Rae Hall for her collection Neither Are Crows. The final judge was Joe Weil. Her collection is published by NYQ Books. This award includes a $5,000 prize, 25 author copies, and today’s featured reading. Terry is the author of the chapbook The Something We Make from Nothing (Seven Kitchens Press, 2024). Other recent publications include Cider Press Review, San Pedro River Review, Pine Row Press, and Litmosphere.