Letras Latinas’ 20th anniversary celebration continues. For this seventh installment of our yearlong celebration, we welcome Presidential Inaugural Poet and National Humanities Medal recipient, RICHARD BLANCO. He will be joined by RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ, award-winning writer, editor, and critic, whose most recent book, Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology, we will also be celebrating. Special guest SUSANA PLOTTS-PINEDA, from the Library of America, will be on hand to speak about this ground-breaking volume. Books will be available for purchase and signing. Reception to follow at the conclusion of the event. Free and open to the public. Co-sponsors: Creative Writing Program, the Center for Social Concerns, Department of Romance Languages and Literature, Initiative on Race and Resilience, the Poetry Foundation,  the St. Joe County Public Library (South Bend, Indiana), and José E. Fernández Hispanic Caribbean Studies Initiative   More on featured poets: Richard Blanco was selected by President Obama as the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet. 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 poetry, including his most recent, Homeland of My Body: New and Selected Poems. 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 Patterson 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. Rigoberto González is the author of eighteen books of poetry and prose. His awards include Lannan, Guggenheim, NEA, NYFA, and USA Rolón fellowships, the PEN/ Voelcker Award, the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Contributing editor for Poets & Writers, he is the series editor for the Camino del Sol Latinx Literary Series at the University of Arizona Press, and the editor of Latino Poetry: A Library of America Anthology. Currently, he’s Distinguished Professor of English and the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey. Originally published at latinostudies.nd.edu.

Your 20th anniversary Presenting Series season is brimming with unmissable gems. One is the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the famed ensemble founded over 90 years ago, which our audiences last experienced in 2006. Encounter the raw power and unbridled emotion of Sibelius' Fifth Symphony, Shostakovich's explosive First Violin Concerto with incomparable violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja as a soloist, and a new work by Kennedy Center Honoree, Cuban-American composer Tania León. This rare treat will ignite your emotions through a concert of dazzling orchestral colors. GET TICKETS  

This biopic follows Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan), who graduated from Harvard Law and sidestepped the well-oiled path to lucrative law firm money and instead moved to Alabama where he defended individuals unjustly sentenced to death through a broken criminal justice system. Profiled in the film is one of Stevenson's most incendiary cases: In 1987, Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx) was sentenced to death for a notorious murder despite a preponderance of evidence proving his innocence and the only incriminating testimony coming from a biased source. Litigating on behalf of McMillian, Stevenson learns quickly the severity of both hot and cold racism baked into the criminal justice system. GET TICKETS!  

Two-time Tony Award-winning composer Jeanine Tesori's powerful new opera Grounded, commissioned by the Met and based on librettist George Brant's acclaimed play, wrestles with the ethical quandaries and psychological toll of 21st-century warfare. Mezzo-soprano Emily D'Angelo, one of opera's most compelling young stars, portrays Jess, a hot-shot fighter pilot whose unplanned pregnancy takes her out of the cockpit and lands her in Las Vegas, operating a Reaper drone halfway around the world. As she struggles to adjust to this new way of doing battle, she fights to maintain her sanity, and her soul, as she is called to rain down death by remote control. Met Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin oversees the Met premiere of Tesori's kaleidoscopic score and a cast that also features tenor Ben Bliss as the Wyoming rancher who becomes Jess's husband. Michael Mayer's high-tech staging, using a vast array of LED screens, presents a variety of perspectives on the action, including the drone's predatory view from high above. GET TICKETS  

When John Bellairs released The House with a Clock in Its Walls in 1973, he pulled from his childhood in nearby Marshall, Michigan, specifically the Cronin House. Tours are available for fans who want to make the day trip. That inspiration became text and, in turn, inspired illustrator Edward Gorey's drawings. Together, the two created one of its era's most compelling children's mystery novels. Two generations on, the book was adapted for film with faithfulness to the tale that follows the story many know well: The young orphan Lewis (Owen Vacarro) goes to live with his uncle (Jack Black) and soon realizes he and his neighbor (Cate Blanchett) have magical powers, which come in handy when Lewis mistakenly resurrects the dead. GET TICKETS!  

A cornerstone of the horror film, F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror is resurrected in an HD edition mastered from the acclaimed 35mm restoration by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung. This edition offers unprecedented visual clarity and historical faithfulness to the original release version. An unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Nosferatu remains to many viewers the most unsettling vampire film ever made, and its bald, spidery vampire, personified by the diabolical Max Schreck, continues to spawn imitations in the realm of contemporary cinema. GET TICKETS!