Join Cambridge Forum and Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation for a very special collaborative event at the Museum featuring former poet laureate Richard Blanco who will read and talk about his new book, How To Love A Country.

The evening will begin with a wine reception at 6:00pm; the event itself will kick off at 7 pm and a book-signing will follow. There will be live jazz preceding and following the reading by Ken Field/saxophone and Blake Newman/bass. - This free event is sponsored by the Lowell Institute.

Richard Blanco

Poet, author, educator
(and engineer!)

As presidential inaugural poet, educator, and advocate, Richard Blanco has crisscrossed the nation inviting communities to connect to the heart of human experience and our shared identity as a country. In this new collection of poems, his first in over seven years, Blanco continues to invite a conversation with all Americans. Through an oracular yet intimate and accessible voice, he addresses the complexities and contradictions of our nationhood and the unresolved sociopolitical matters that affect us all.

The poems form a mosaic of seemingly varied topics: the Pulse Nightclub massacre; an unexpected encounter on a visit to Cuba; the forced exile of 8,500 Navajos in 1868; a lynching in Alabama; the arrival of a young Chinese woman at Angel Island in 1938; the incarceration of a gifted writer; and the poet’s abiding love for his partner, who he is finally allowed to wed as a gay man. But despite each poem’s unique concern or occasion, all are fundamentally struggling with the overwhelming question of how to love this country.

Blanco unravels the very fabric of the American narrative and pursues a resolution to the inherent contradiction of our nation’s psyche and mandate: e pluribus unum (out of many, one). Charged with the utopian idea that no single narrative is more important than another, this book asserts that America could and ought someday to be a country where all narratives converge into one, a country we can all be proud to love and where we can all truly thrive.

Please join Cambridge Forum at the Charles River Museum for an extraordinary evening experiencing how Poetry Fuels Democracy.