Change the Status Quo Social Justice & Service Speaker Series: An Evening with...
Stay tuned for our next annual CSQ Social Justice & Service Speaker Series during the '24-'25 academic year.
The CSA hopes to empower attendees to use the Learn by Doing spirit to challenge social norms, ask critical questions, demand solutions and make lasting social change. Through an inspiring keynote and engaging speaker series in the months leading up to and following, our hope is attendees will leave with a new-found sense and understanding of social justice, and how they can take ownership of their role in moving the needle with regard to social change.
Most recently, we hosted Richard Blanco as our CSQ keynote speaker. Selected by President Obama as the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet in U.S. 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. His work asks those universal questions we all ask ourselves on our own journeys: Where am I from? Where do I belong? Who am I in this world? Currently, he serves as education ambassador for the Academy of American Poets and the first-ever poet laureate of Miami-Dade County.
