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. He has also authored the memoirs For All of Us , One Today , and The Prince of Los Cocuyos . 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. When Dav Pilkey was a kid, he was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia. Dav was so disruptive in class that his teachers made him sit out in the hallway every day. Luckily, Dav loved to draw and make up stories. He spent his time in the hallway creating his own original comic books -- the very first adventures of Dog Man and Captain Underpants. In the second grade, Dav's teacher ripped up his comics and told him he couldn't spend the rest of his life making silly books. Fortunately, Dav was not a very good listener.