The Southern Collective Experience

08/27/2026

I’m grateful to be part of “Singing Resistance,” a powerful evening of music, poetry, dance, and community in support of Maine’s immigrant community and the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project (ILAP).

The evening brings together an extraordinary lineup of Maine artists, including the Pihcintu Multinational Girls’ Choir, Madeleine Hanna and the Jawahir Arabic Music Ensemble, Somali oud player and singer Hadithi Abdulle, Franco-American poet Jeri Thériault, and the Singing Resistance chapters of Portland and Brunswick/Topsham. I’ll be joining by video, and I’ve donated signed copies of my poems, which will be available for purchase by donation.

At a moment when immigrant communities are facing so much uncertainty and fear, gatherings like this matter. Come stand in solidarity—and help support ILAP’s vital work providing legal services, community education, and advocacy for low-income immigrants and their families.

Saturday, October 24 | 7–9 p.m.
Doors open at 6:30 p.m.
Woodfords Congregational Church,
202 Woodfords St., Portland, Maine

Admission is by cash donation at the door, with proceeds benefiting ILAP and participating artists impacted by recent immigration activity.

I hope you’ll join us for an evening of music, poetry, community, and resistance.

Woodfords Congregational Church, Portland, Maine Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project (ILAP) UU Church of Brunswick Maine

08/27/2026

08/08/2026

God bless Richard Blanco

Few poets have stayed with me as long—or as deeply—as Elizabeth Bishop.

You can imagine my excitement to join Kevin Young on The New Yorker to read and reflect on Bishop's "Questions of Travel."

Inspired by the years she spent living in Brazil, the poem speaks to one of the central questions that shapes my own work: What is home? How do we belong—to the landscapes we inhabit, the language we inherit, and one another? Our conversation explores the ways travel and language shape us—and how translation, in all its forms, becomes a way of understanding ourselves and each other.

I also had the chance to read my poem "My Father in English"—first published in The New Yorker—and to talk about how it came to me almost in a single breath. I remember translating for my parents when I was just five years old. Language became power, but it also became a way of fathoming love, sacrifice, and inheritance.

Thank you to Kevin for creating such a generous space for conversation, and for his enduring devotion to poetry and the meaningful questions it invites us to ask.

You can listen on The New Yorker's website or wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/poetry/richard-blanco-reads-elizabeth-bishop
: https://pod.link/784600888