FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Jonas Werner Email: info@freeportfolio.org

Presidential Inaugural Poet Richard Blanco to Headline Freeport Folio Open Mic, July 30

Freeport, Maine | Freeport Folio is pleased to announce that Richard Blanco, the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet of the United States and a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, will be the featured reader at its summer open mic on Thursday July 30, 2026.

The event will take place from 7:00PM to 8:30 PM location TBD. The event is free and open to the public. Open mic sign-ups will be available at the door. Students, longtime poets, first-time readers and listeners are all welcome.

About Richard Blanco

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 Patterson Prize, and a Lambda Prize for memoir. He was 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.

A longtime Maine resident, Blanco lives in Bethel.

Website: https://richard-blanco.com/