The Joshua Ringel Memorial Fund honors CTY (Center for Talented Youth) alumnus and avid poetry lover Joshua Ringel and his parents, Mel and Barbara. The fund supports the arts in Baltimore by bringing a distinguished poet to the city each year for a free public poetry reading.

Josh's teacher, the renowned poet Kenneth Koch, gave the inaugural Joshua Ringel Memorial Reading in 1998. Since then, many other distinguished poets including Terrance Hayes, Naomi Shihab Nye, Natasha Tretheway, Billy Collins, John Ashbery, and Sharon Olds have lent their voices to this remarkable series. A gift from Josh's father in 2004 created an endowment at Johns Hopkins, with a goal of sustaining the reading in perpetuity.

Learn more about Joshua Ringel and how to support the fund.

2024 Featured Poet: Richard Blanco

Richard Blanco, who read at President Obama’s second inauguration in 2013, is the youngest and first Latinx, immigrant, and gay person selected to be a U.S. Presidential Inaugural Poet. In 2023, Richard 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. Richard 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 and 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 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.

Event Details

Joshua Ringel Memorial Reading with Richard Blanco 
Sunday, April 28, 2024, 2:30 p.m.
Baltimore Museum of Art Auditorium
10 Art Museum Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218

Registration preferred. This event is free and open to the public.

Register now

Past Series Poets