CAMDEN — Inaugural poet Richard Blanco will be the keynote poet at the first annual Camden Festival of Poetry. The festival will take place on Saturday, May 20, from 1 -5 p.m., in the First Congregational Church of Camden. Admission is free, and all are welcome.

“We are excited to have the internationally renowned poet Richard Blanco as the keynote for our inaugural Festival – he expresses such enthusiasm for Maine, for America, and for all people,” says Meg Weston, Festival co-founder, in a news release.

Richard Blanco is one of the most beloved and influential poets and storytellers writing today, according to the Festival, in a news release. A historic presidential inaugural poet (2013 for Barack Obama’s second inauguration), Blanco was recently honored by the National Endowment for the Humanities for “breathing life into the identity and idea of America.”

“He is much in demand as a public speaker, teacher and memoirist, and was the recent inaugural poet for Governor Mills; he continues to travel the world, inviting audiences to reconnect to the heart of the human experience and all of its beautiful diversity,” said the release.

Blanco’s poetry has appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, USA Today, Ploughshares, The New Republic, Indiana Review, New York Times Magazine, Michigan Quarterly Review, and many other literary journals and anthologies. Blanco’s first book of poetry, City of a Hundred Fires, was published in 1998 to widespread acclaim, winning the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Directions to the Beach of the Dead, published in 2005, won the PEN/Beyond Margins Award. In 2012, Blanco’s third book of poetry, Looking for The Gulf Motel, was published and received the Paterson Poetry Prize, the 2012 Maine Literary Award for Poetry, and the Thom Gunn Award. Beacon Press published Blanco’s fourth book of poetry, How to Love a Country, in March 2019.

For more information please visit www.thepoetscorner.org/festival.

Camden Festival of Poetry is a nonprofit organization founded by Meg Weston and Mark S. Burrows.