Richard Blanco

POETRY IN AMERICAS4, E1

Phillis Wheatley: To the University

In 1770s Boston, Phillis Wheatley was at the same time enslaved and an international celebrity: a writer who mastered the most persuasive rhetoric of the day to publish enduring arguments about freedom. Inaugural poets Amanda Gorman and Richard Blanco, writer Clint Smith, and scholars Glenda Carpio and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. join host Elisa New to read two of Wheatley’s poems for public occasions.
POETRY IN AMERICAS3, E2

Looking for the Gulf Motel

Richard Blanco's poem "Looking for The Gulf Motel" transports readers to 1970s Florida, recalling a Cuban American family’s vacations on the sparkling sands of Marco Island. Blanco and international superstar Gloria Estefan join Elisa New and a chorus of Cuban American adults in Miami and middle school students in New York City to reflect on family and what it means to call a place home.