To this day, I don’t know exactly how I was chosen as inaugural poet. I asked committee staff, but no one seemed to know the details. I had never met the president—I’ve never met any president. In fact, I believe I am the only inaugural poet in history who didn’t have some kind of personal connection to the administration that chose him or her. This made my selection even more surprising, and the honor felt even greater, given the trust they had placed in me and my work without ever knowing me personally. However, after a while, I began fearing that the exact details of my selection might not be what I had imagined, so I preferred to simply cling (and still do) to my romantic musings: the president reading my books in the Oval Office, so completely absorbed by my work that he tells his chief of staff to hold all his calls, no matter who; or, perhaps, the president reading my poems at the dinner table to the whole family; or, dare I imagine, he and the First Lady snuggled together in bed, reading my love poems to each other and discussing them with delight.
Perhaps there might have been some political affinity that influenced my selection, despite the family lore that I was named after Richard Nixon. After all, I did fill a lot of “boxes”: I was the youngest, first openly gay, first immigrant, and first Latino inaugural poet. And the list could go on and on with other firsts that weren’t really highlighted: first engineer, first Floridian, first Mainer, first poet with bushy eyebrows—wait, I think Frost may have beat me on that one! Regardless, I can’t help believing that I was selected based on the quality of my work, and that the president must’ve read my poems and been personally involved in my selection, especially since he is such a literary person and an accomplished writer himself. I also can’t help thinking that he may have chosen me because he connected with my story as a child of exiles/immigrants in the same way that I’ve always connected with his story. Surely he must have had to navigate questions about cultural identity, his place in America, and the American Dream throughout his life, as I’ve had to do.
Questions like the ones I had to face on the first day of my first graduate creative writing course at Florida International University. After we read and discussed poems by Whitman, Frost, and Ginsberg, Professor Campbell McGrath announced our assignment: Write a poem about America. Eager yet anxious, I thought: What do I know about America? What is America? Sprawled on my bed that night (and every night that whole week), I continued asking questions that hadn’t really surfaced until then: Was I American? Was I Cuban? Both? Neither? Where did I come from? Where do I belong? Finally, the day before the assignment was due, I gave up. Or I should say, I gave in—surrendered to the emotional truth about my experience, the only America I knew. I set to paper a poem I titled in Spanish “América,” narrating my childhood pleas for an authentic meal at Thanksgiving, or San Giving, as my mother still calls it, as in San Pedro, San Ignacio, or San Cristóbal—a whole different kind of feast day!