Belonging: Reflections on Identity, Exile, and Home, A Conversation with Richard Blanco

June is LGBTQ+ Pride month and although Pride parades and parties and celebrations have all been canceled because of stay-at-home orders, this year’s Pride feels more momentous and significant than ever, not only because of this month’s landmark ruling by the Supreme Court, but also because LGBTQ+ Pride began as protest.  

In commemoration and celebration, the Center for Humanities in an Urban Environment (CHUE) at Florida International University is partnering with Emory University, the Decatur Book Festival, and the Invisible History project to present “Belonging: Reflections on Identity, Exile, and Home, A Conversation with Richard Blanco” on Wednesday 24 June at 2:00 PM EST via Zoom and Livestream Simulcast on Facebook.

Blanco is the first openly gay person, first Latinx person, the first immigrant, and the youngest person to be a presidential inaugural poet. In “Belonging,” these identities come to the fore, as Blanco and Emory University’s Karen Stolley (Department of Spanish & Portuguese) discuss what it means to belong. What does it mean to need a person, or a place? Do we get to choose where we belong? Or with whom? What is belonging? These questions are especially familiar to LGBTQ+ people, but ultimately resonate with all of us.

Blanco’s archives have found a home at Emory’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscripts and Rare Books Library, and Blanco is a frequent interlocutor with faculty and students in his Emory “familia,” including his intervention in Emory’s “Journeys to Education Teach-Out.”