Richard Blanco, the poet who likes to describe himself as being made in Cuba, assembled in Spain and imported to the United States, will serve as the inaugural poet when President Barack Obama takes the oath of office for a second term this month.

Blanco will be the first Latino, the first openly gay person and the youngest poet to serve in the highly coveted role.

A statement from the inaugural committee said Blanco was chosen because the power of his poetry is rooted in American identity.

"Richard's writing will be wonderfully fitting for an inaugural that will celebrate the strength of the American people and our nation's great diversity," Obama said in a statement Wednesday that announced his selection.

With that announcement, Blanco will surely be catapulted to fame in the vein of Natasha Trethewey, 46, who this year was chosen to become the nation's poet laureate.

"I'm beside myself, bestowed with this great honor, brimming over with excitement, awe, and gratitude," Blanco, 44, said in a statement.

"In many ways, this is the very 'stuff' of the American Dream, which underlies so much of my work and my life's story -- America's story, really," he said. "I am thrilled by the thought of coming together during this great occasion to celebrate our country and its people through the power of poetry."

Blanco was conceived in Cuba to parents who fled Fidel Castro's authoritarian rule. He was born in Madrid but grew up in the United States, living first in New York and then in Miami.

His first book of poetry, "City of a Hundred Fires," was all about a Cuban-American immigrant's quest to define a cultural identity. It won the prestigious Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh.

"I always describe this book as a cultural coming of age 'story,' tracing the cultural yearnings and negotiation of growing up Cuban American," Blanco said of the book, named after Cienfuegos, the hometown of his family.

In an interview that aired on NPR on Wednesday, Blanco said he has been thinking about his heritage again in the past few weeks after he learned that he would be writing the inaugural poem.

"Even though it's been a few weeks since I found out, just thinking about my parents and my grandparents and all the struggles they've been through, and how, you know, here I am, first-generation Cuban-American, and this great honor that has just come to me, and just feeling that sense of just incredible gratitude and love," he said.

And in a telephone interview from his home in Bethel, Maine, he told the New York Times that he related to Obama's life story and his multicultural background.

"There has been a spiritual connection in that sense," he said. "I feel in some ways that when I'm writing about my family, I'm writing about him."

Educated in Miami, Blanco began his professional career as a consultant engineer. He wanted to make his family happy by pursuing the sort of career expected in the Cuban-American community.

But his musings on identity led him to writing, and he enrolled in a master's program in fine arts and creative writing at Florida International University. His mentor there was Campbell McGrath, who himself has written several books of poetry.

Even before McGrath had moved from Chicago to start a teaching job in Florida, he received a letter from Blanco.

"I'm not a poet, but would you let me into your class?" Blanco asked McGrath.

McGrath thought Blanco sounded ambitious, but the very first poem he wrote in class, "America," became the first poem in "City of a Hundred Fires."

"From the get-go, his poems were good enough to be published," McGrath said.

He brought to his poetry the structural, analytical abilities of an engineer. He was able to go beyond the beauty of the words, to look beneath the surface and examine the engineering of the poem, McGrath said.

But more than anything, McGrath felt that the power in Blanco's poems lie in the universal messages he conveys. Yes, he writes about identity, but he does so in a deeply personal way: through family and relationships.

"They are deeply humanistic poems," McGrath said.

In "America," for example, Blanco writes about how there was pork served at every family gathering and that one year, he, as a 7-year-old, explained that they should have turkey instead on Thanksgiving. That's what everyone else did.

"Abuelita prepared the poor fowl

as if committing an act of treason

faking her enthusiasm for my sake."

McGrath said one of his personal favorites is "El Florida Room," a poem about home and family published in Blanco's latest book, "Looking for the Gulf Motel."

"Not a sitting room, but El Florida, where

I sat alone for hours with butterflies

frozen on the polyester curtains

and faces of Lladró figurines: sad angels,

clowns, and princesses with eyes glazed

blue and gray, gazing from behind

the glass doors of the wall cabinet.

Not a tv room, but where I watched

Creature Feature as a boy, clinging

to my brother, safe from vampires

in the same sofa where I fell in love

with Clint Eastwood and my Abuelo