On May 2, 2026, The Poetry Center in Paterson will offer morning poetry workshops and afternoon readings by Richard Blanco and José Antonio Rodríguez as part of the Distinguished Poets Series.
Registration is required for workshops. Coffee, tea, and a light breakfast will be provided for workshop participants. You can check registration availability by emailing Cynthia Pagan at the Poetry Center. Workshops are available for a fee of $20. In-person workshops will be held at the Poetry Center in Paterson from 10 AM to 12 PM.
Following their workshop, poets will give a reading at 1 pm. Poetry Center readings are always free and open to the public. These readings are recorded and archived for later viewing on the Poetry Center’s YouTube channel.
Selected by President Obama as the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet in U.S. history, Richard Blanco was the youngest, the first Latinx, immigrant, and gay person to serve in that role. In 2023, Blanco was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Biden from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Born in Madrid to Cuban exile parents and raised in Miami in a working-class family, Blanco’s personal negotiation of cultural identity and the universal themes of place and belonging characterize Blanco’s many collections of poetry, including his most recent, Homeland of My Body, which reassess traditional notions of home as strictly a geographical, tangible place that merely exist outside us, but rather, within us. He has also authored the memoirs For All Of Us: One Today: An Inaugural Poet’s Journey and The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood. Blanco has received numerous awards, including the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize, the PEN American Beyond Margins Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and a Lambda Prize for memoir. He was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and has received numerous honorary degrees. Currently, he serves as Education Ambassador for The Academy of American Poets and is an Associate Professor at Florida International University. In April 2022, Blanco was appointed the first-ever Poet Laureate of Miami-Dade County.
José Antonio Rodríguez is the author of four poetry collections, the most recent of which are This American Autopsy, cited as “new and noteworthy” by The New York Times, and The Day’s Hard Edge. He’s also the author of the memoir House Built on Ashes, shortlisted for the PEN America Los Angeles Award and the Lambda Literary Award. His poems have been published widely, including in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, The Missouri Review, and Paterson Literary Review. His work has been anthologized most recently in Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology, A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker: 1925-2025, How to Get Home in the Dark: Poems on Mental Health and Healing, and the fifteenth edition of The Norton Introduction to Literature. He holds degrees in Biology and Theatre Arts and a Ph.D. in English from Binghamton University. He is a gay Mexican immigrant and first-generation high school and college graduate who teaches writing and literary translation in the M.F.A. program at The University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley. Learn more at jarodriguez.org The Poetry Center offers poetry writing workshops in-person and virtually in conjunction with the Distinguished Poets Reading Series. Over the years, distinguished poets have included poet laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, Inaugural poets and others of national and international reputation, such as Allen Ginsberg, William Stafford, Amiri Baraka, Lucille Clifton, Stanley Kunitz, Billy Collins, Marge Piercy, Mark Doty, Marie Howe, Kim Addonizio, Billy Collins, Dorianne Laux, Jan Beatty, Robert Sward, Patricia Smith, Martín Espada, Toi Derricotte and Richard Blanco.
Maria Mazziotti Gillan's newest poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (2021). Other recent publications are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow, and the poetry collections What Blooms in Winter and The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets, a pairing of her poems with her paintings.
Maria's artist website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.
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