Chatting With the Third Annual San Diego Literary Gala Speaker Richard Blanco

As some of you have gathered from previous articles, I am the director of the Multicultural LGBT Literary Foundation. Every November, we hold the annual Literary Foundation Gala that honors the month we first began. This year's gala speaker is none other than author, Richard Blanco.

Richard Blanco was born in Madrid and immigrated to the United States as an infant with his exiled Cuban family. His work includes the memoir "The Prince of los Cocuyos" and the poetry collections "City of a Hundred Fires," "Directions to the Beach of the Dead," "Looking for the Gulf Motel" and "For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet's Journey," among others.

In 2013, Blanco was chosen to serve as the fifth inaugural poet of the United States for Barack Obama. Inaugural poets before him included Robert Frost and Maya Angelou. Blanco performed "One Today," an original poem he wrote for the occasion, becoming the youngest, first Latino, first immigrant and first openly gay writer to hold the honor, making history and illustrating the lowering of barriers for gay and lesbian writers and Latino/a writers. A history we should know deeply and be very proud of.

I had a chance to speak with Blanco before he arrives in San Diego for the literary gala on Friday, Nov. 13, and ask him a few questions about life and literature.

One of the things that I most wanted to know was what in his opinion were some of the chief challenges that LGBT Latino/a authors face. It is no secret that Latino/a authors are underrepresented in the literary world and LGBT Latino/a authors are even more so. Yet Blanco has managed to attain one of the highest honors a poet can achieve, and enjoy a fairly illustrious career. I was eager to see what challenges he viewed himself as having to overcome and where did he see overlap between his experiences of those of other LGBT Latino/as.

Blanco put it beautifully, stating, "I think it would apply to more than just authors, I think it applies to all LGBT Latino/as. This idea of identity or 'cultural sexuality,' as I call it, this double or even triple identity that we try to finesse and find harmony in. We cannot separate these identities from each other, and there is not one brand of man or woman... or even homophobia. And, thinking about those intersections in the context of my culture and where we feel most at home is not only based on sexuality, but also on culture. For example, my ideal setting is a Cuban gay bar!" (Laughs)

Blanco continued, explaining, "In addition to barriers for LGBT Latino/as, we are also witnessing a rise in illiteracy in the U.S. I am speaking strictly of reading and writing proficiency, not technological literacy or otherwise."

Literature is essential to healthy identity development for LGBT people, and Blanco's response, when asked why he thought literature was important for the LGBT community, was this: "I think all artists offer us insights, but especially authors, and they do this emotional work for us in a way. They map out the emotions for us. The most powerful thing to happen in literature, is when you see yourself mirrored in the story and it provides a template on how to manage our own lives and emotions. Literature explores the parts of our lives that we can improve, that we may not dedicate the time to otherwise and help us be better and more attuned humans."

I was struck by Blanco's response, because even though I adore literature, I had never considered that it does act as an emotional buffer zone-a place in which one can work through various challenges, with the writer's characters and arrive at a different emotional place altogether.

To hear more from Blanco and meet him, be sure to get your tickets! The Third Annual Literary Gala takes place on Friday, November 13 at the San Diego Central Library, 330 Park Boulevard in Downtown San Diego. For tickets and more information, go to sdliteraryfoundation.org