SANDRA CISNEROS PRESENTS: WRITING FROM THE TABOO

Paul Alexander has published eight books, among them Rough Magic, a biography of Sylvia Plath, and Salinger, a biography of J. D. Salinger that was the basis of a documentary that appeared on American Masters on PBS, Netflix, and HBO. His journalism and commentary have been published in numerous magazines and newspapers, among them New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Newsday, New York, Guardian, Nation, Washington Post, and Rolling Stone. He teaches at Hunter College. His latest work is Bitter Crop: The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday’s Last Year.

Selected by President Obama as the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet in United States 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 his 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.