Luminous: An Evening of Poetry & Prose With Poet-Engineer Richard Blanco and Physicist-Artist Smitha Vishveshwara
Book reading and signing, with special guestsMonday, April 21, 2025, 5–7 p.m.Illini Union, South Lounge1401 W. Green Street, Urbana |
Join us April 21 at the Illini Union’s South Lounge for a book reading and signing featuring two soulful art-science creators, with special guests. Books available for purchase. Light refreshments served.
This event celebrates National Poetry Month, World Quantum Day, and the 2025 International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ), recognizing 100 years since the initial development of quantum mechanics.
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Internationally celebrated poet Richard Blanco ... The salty salve of these |
Illinois physicist and artist Smitha Vishveshwara “Somehow, deep, deep down, we must all know that we come from the cosmos. That we will return to it. That we are truly star dust… Science may never reveal the journey of the soul. But Science, Natural Philosophy, tells us how our mortal flesh came to be. Allow me…to recount to you this story…of how existence burst forth into being. Of how atoms came to be. Of how the fire of a million stars created the elements.” |
| Richard Blanco’s Homeland of My Body is a collection of over 100 new and previously published poems selected by the author to represent his evolution as a writer grappling with his identity, working to find and define “home.” Blanco reexamines his life-long quest to find his proverbial home and all that it encompasses: love, family, identity and ultimately art itself. In the closing section of the volume, he has come to understand and internalize the idea that “home” is not one place, not one thing, and lives both inside him and inside his art. | The epistolary novel Two Revolutions: Einstein’s Relativity and Quantum Physics by Smitha Vishveshwara and C.V. Vishveshwara is a series of reflections, transcripts, imagined vignettes, and letters written between two renowned physicists, a father in India, a daughter in Urbana, Illinois. The two cherish the opportunity to muse and ponder playfully together, while sharing a deep dive into each their areas of expertise, two of the greatest revolutions in our comprehension of the universe. Sadly, C.V. Vishveshwara passed away before the book was completed, and Smitha Vishveshwara finished the novel guided by “that sunlit, mirthful, profound spirit” with which he lived life. |
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Richard Blanco is a poet, public speaker, author, playwright, and civil engineer. 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. 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 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. |
Smitha Vishveshwara is a physics professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, a writer, a science-artist, an educator, and a mother. Through her scientific field of expertise in quantum condensed matter physics, she studies the coldest states of matter in the universe, emergent behavior, out-of-equilibrium dynamics, and more. In her research, she forges connections with quantum information science, biophysics, cosmology, and space explorations. Vishveshwara also catalyzes creative art-science collaborations working with artists from across the campus community and beyond through CASCaDe (the Collective for Art-Science, Creativity and Discovery, etc.). Her performance pieces include theater pieces Quantum Voyages and Quantum Rhapsodies, the circus performance Cosmic Tumbles, Quantum Leaps, and the short film, Solaria. Vishveshwara has chaired the American Physical Society’s Division of Condensed Matter Physics (2022–2023). She serves on the global steering committee for the United Nations 2025 International Year of the Quantum and is a Public Voices Fellow with the Op-Ed Project of the University of Illinois System. |
Richard Blanco’s Illinois campus visit is sponsored and hosted by The Grainger College of Engineering, the Department of Physics, and the Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology Center (IQUIST). It is co-hosted by the Krannert Center for Performing Arts, the Krannert Art Museum, the Center for Advanced Study, the Robert J. and Katherin Carr Visiting Authors Series, the Creative Writing Program, the Department of English, and the Department of Latina/Latino Studies.