Background on Blanco and Garcia

by Moira O'Sullivan

riCHard BlanCo and Vanessa garCia, PHoto By James Hadley From Cuba to Madrid to New York to Miami to Maine, Richard Blanco has been a man of the world since his mother left Cuba while seven months pregnant with him. The Cuban American poet has lived his life searching for the meaning of home, feeling torn between his Cuban heritage, his Spanish birth, his Miami adolescence, and his childhood yearning to be as American as the Brady Bunch. He has found himself and his home through his writing, piecing together the mosaic of his identity, like so many others in this country whose families come from away. It wasn’t until Blanco was personally asked by President Obama in 2013 to write a poem to read at his second inauguration that the conflicting pieces of his identity fell into place. “For the first time in my life I knew I had a place at the American table. I had found my place. The greatest gift of the whole experience was to realize that I was home all along,” Blanco told NPR. He was at that time the youngest, the first openly gay, and the first Latinx poet to take the podium at an inauguration. Sitting next to his Cuban immigrant mother on stage, he and his poem “One Today” represented the many Americans who come from a vast array of cultures and call this place home.

Since that life-changing moment, Blanco has continued to explore themes of identity and his place in this country in his published books of poetry How to Love a Country and Boundaries, and shares his unique journey in his memoir, The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood. Blanco now calls Bethel, Maine, home, as far away from Miami as he can get. He travels giving speeches and workshops, spreading his deep love for and belief in writing. "Language matters,” he told NBC News.”That's how [poetry] can help heal us—by asking questions we aren't asking of ourselves and others, by changing the conversation, the rhetoric, the discourse, so that we can see beyond abstract language of sociopolitical jargon and arrive at greater truths."

A poet at heart, Blanco’s first foray into playwriting wouldn’t be complete without his writing partner and fellow Cuban American and Miamian, Vanessa Garcia. Their joint interest in themes of searching for identity in their work have informed the creative process of Sweet Goats & Blueberry Señoritas. Garcia is a Cuban American multidisciplinary writer: screenwriter, playwright, novelist, and journalist. When describing her work, she says, “My intention as an artist is to record and illuminate the world in which I live.” Her debut novel, White Light, follows a visual artist who gets her big break at a gallery just as her Cuban-immigrant father dies. She must deal with her grief, her heritage, and the pressure to create good art. It was named a Best Book of 2015 by NPR.

Much of her work explores what it means to be, as she calls herself, an “ABC,” or Americanborn Cuban. She was a passenger on the first cruise ship to sail to Cuba in fifty years back in 2016, an emotional journey returning to the land that her family had fled. In the essay she wrote about the experience for Narratively, she said of her nerves before arrival, “For me it feels like a hurricane is making its way through my gut. The ghosts of my family’s stories are bumping up against my skin, from the inside out.” These stories are what propel her own storytelling, be it memoir, fiction, plays, or screenplays. Garcia’s acute awareness of what her family has experienced comes through in her own writing as she navigates her parents’ impact on herself and her life in Miami. As she explains, “Havana existed before I ever saw it for myself—in my bones, my collective unconscious, my DNA.”