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
