VENTURA — Diversity in Culture Festival Featured Presentation: Poet Laureate Richard Blanco, Thursday, April 13 at 1pm in the Ventura College Applied Science Center, Room 150. Seating is limited, free admission, please reserve your tickets on EventBrite.
Richard Blanco, the fifth Inaugural poet of the United States, holds the distinction of being the first Latino, first immigrant, first openly gay-identified, and also the youngest person to hold this prestigious position in the United States to date. He also wrote for President Barack Obama’s 2013 inaugural ceremony. “I was made in Cuba, assembled in Spain and imported to the United States. My stories are always about negotiation and how do we fit in…And as I wrote more and more about it, I realized it was a universal question: How do we belong, where do we belong, how do we belong together, what does that mean?” Born on February 15, 1968, in Madrid, Spain, Richard Blanco, of Cuban heritage, immigrated to the United States and eventually worked as a civil engineer. He turned to writing and studying poetry and has become an award-winning author with books like City of a Hundred Fires and Directions to the Beach of the Dead.