The genius of Lin-Manuel Miranda: A Q&A with creator & PSU scholar Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Visiting PSU scholar Daniel Pollack-Pelzner – who teaches theater historical past and English programs within the College of the Arts and College of Liberal Arts and Sciences – lately revealed “Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist” (Simon & Schuster, September 2025), exploring the influences that formed the enduring creator of the Broadway musicals “Hamilton” and “In the Heights.”

This remarkable book, which has obtained nationwide protection within the New York Times, National Public Radio, and extra, provides an intimate, behind-the-scenes have a look at Miranda’s inventive origin story, drawing on over 150 interviews along with his household, associates, and collaborators – and plenty of with Miranda himself. Packed with candy, humorous, illuminating and heart-tugging anecdotes from Miranda’s early years, the guide explores the concept that the artist isn’t a “born genius,” however relatively a tireless, relentlessly curious creator and empathetic collaborator who has by no means shrunk from a chance to experiment, fail and study.

We had the possibility to speak with Pollack-Pelzner in regards to the challenge this month.

KOS: How did you come to jot down this biography? How has your profession put you on the highway to satisfy Lin-Manuel Miranda and obtain the unimaginable alternative to jot down a guide about his life?

DPP: I’ve been a musical theater nut since I used to be a child rising up in Portland within the ’80s. My dad waited tables, and on Saturday nights, after I helped him put out the place settings, my mother would take me to the video retailer to lease a film of a Broadway present from her personal childhood. I keep in mind crying on the finish of West Side Story. I used to be in The Sound of Music at Lincoln High School, down the road from PSU, and I liked going to reveals on the Oregon Shakespeare Festival each summer time. But it wasn’t till I turned a Shakespeare professor and returned to Portland after grad college that I began questioning who our Shakespeares could be in the present day. I began writing profiles of dwelling playwrights for The New Yorker, and that led me to see “Hamilton” when it opened in 2015. Like nearly everybody, I fell in love. I tracked it around the globe, reporting on its shifting significance in London and Puerto Rico. And each time I interviewed Lin-Manuel Miranda, I used to be struck at how he credited his academics for serving to him turn into an artist. He at all times talked about selecting his subsequent tasks primarily based on what he may study from his collaborators. As a instructor myself, that moved me. I believed maybe I may write a guide about his schooling that may assist to encourage my very own college students. I despatched him a proposal with the unabashedly cringy topic line: “Who tells your story?” To my shock and delight, he invited me to satisfy.

KOS: It’s so uncommon for a theater artist to turn into a family title. Why do you assume Miranda’s work resonates so deeply with folks — even with those that’ve by no means attended a Hamilton efficiency or belted a Broadway tune of their lives?

DPP: Lin-Manuel has at all times needed to bridge pop music and Broadway. For his seventeenth birthday, his girlfriend took him to see Rent, which was the “Hamilton”-level smash of the Nineteen Nineties. He was thrilled at a present that sounded just like the music he and his associates listened to on their Walkmans and that seemed just like the folks he noticed on the A practice in Manhattan. That’s what he needed to create, too, and I believe his songs, which deliver hip-hop and Latin music and pop into musical theater constructions, attract lots of people who may not in any other case pay attention to point out tunes. He additionally jokes that since he is not an amazing piano participant, his melodies should be actually easy and catchy to make it via his fingers! I used to be astonished at what number of of his highschool classmates may nonetheless sing the quantity from his eleventh-grade musical, “Nightmare in D Major,” that he wrote for the ghost of a fetal pig who seeks vengeance on the coed who dissected it. (“Pig, I am just a fetal pig, I am not very big, so why did you cut me up in bio class?”) But extra importantly, he writes songs as an actor, looking for the emotional core of his characters’ struggles. He trusts that if he can establish with a personality, his viewers will, too. When he wrote a tune about Hamilton grieving the demise of his son in a duel, he remembered the demise of certainly one of his personal childhood associates and the way unfathomable, how inexpressible, her dad and mom’ grief should really feel. That turned the opening of “It’s Quiet Uptown”: “There are moments that the words don’t reach / There is suffering too terrible to name.”

KOS: Based in your many conversations with Miranda’s household, colleagues, and associates, what are the defining traits that make him the artist and human he has turn into?

I began out anticipating to jot down a guide about an artist’s craft, and Lin-Manuel delivered. He loves speaking in regards to the influences he synthesizes: he research Jay-Z’s move, Stephen Sondheim’s reprises, Rubén Blades’s socially acutely aware storytelling, and he figures out the best way to make these forces his personal. I knew he he is at all times been an amazing collaborator, keen to search out and assist companions who’ve expertise he would not (writing sheet music, enjoying devices, hitting excessive notes). But I used to be shocked to find out how a lot Lin-Manuel’s power comes from his emotional vulnerability as nicely. He was an especially delicate baby. He cried if he noticed an unhoused particular person on the road. He cried when the information was on. He cried on the chord adjustments in “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” His dad needed to toughen him up, to guard him from bullies in school. He even received Lin-Manuel a boxing puppet to show him to battle again. That wasn’t Lin-Manuel’s model. “No fighting!” he’d protest when the puppet got here out. It was his mom, a baby psychologist, who taught him that it was alright to really feel deeply, and that, in truth, it might make him a greater artist. “You want to be a writer?” his mom would inform him. “Remember this feeling. You’ll use it someday. It’s all grist for the mill.” He says that is what allowed him, years later, to search out his approach into the emotional lives of Aaron Burr and Eliza Hamilton and Moana. (He recommended that I title this biography “Grist for the Mill.”)

KOS: How has Miranda’s cultural identification as Puerto Rican, mixed along with his expertise rising up in New York City, contributed to his inventive strategy, and his public persona?

DPP: Lin-Manuel says he is been code-switching since kindergarten, when he left his immigrant neighborhood on the northernmost tip of Manhattan and began at Hunter College Elementary School, a magnet program on the largely white Upper East Side. He turned “Lin” in school and “Lin-Manuel” at house, questioning how these two selves may match collectively. He was additionally very acutely aware that Puerto Ricans on Broadway tended to be portrayed as knife-wielding gang members. Eager to deliver some side of his household’s tradition to high school, he directed a scholar manufacturing of “West Side Story” in his senior 12 months at Hunter, the identical 12 months that Broadway noticed Paul Simon’s short-lived musical “The Capeman,” which additionally depicted Puerto Ricans as gang fighters stabbing white folks. When Lin-Manuel went to varsity, he lived in a Latino cultural home, surrounded for the primary time in school with different kids of immigrants who toggled between cultures. It was the late Nineteen Nineties, the period of the so-called “Latin boom” in pop music. He determined to jot down a musical about immigrants who labored onerous and cared for his or her households, singing salsa and merengue and hip-hop, set within the Washington Heights neighborhood close to his dad and mom’ house. At the top of his sophomore 12 months, he directed the fledgling model of what later turned his first Broadway hit: “In the Heights.”

KOS: What did you study from him and his experiences that you’ve utilized to your individual work?

DPP: When I used to be in faculty and grad college, I felt cripplingly valuable about my writing. I did not need to put something down on the web page until it was excellent. And so typically, I did not put something down in any respect. That’s a horrible apply for creating something good! What I realized from Lin-Manuel’s profession was that you do not have to get it proper the primary time. Even although he wrote a model of “In the Heights” as a school sophomore, not a single phrase or observe of that script remained within the model that opened eight years in a while Broadway (apart from the title phrase, “In Washington Heights!”). He rewrote each tune, each scene, each line. That helped me recover from my inhibiting perfectionism. I noticed that even artworks I admired did not come into the world absolutely fashioned. What made them good wasn’t their preliminary execution; it was the method of collaboration and revision that Lin-Manuel welcomes. (“Editing is his superpower” his spouse advised me.) Learning that allowed me to belief the revision course of, too. All I needed to do was get down a primary draft of what I realized in order that my editors and readers and associates may assist me make it higher.

KOS: How does your analysis and expertise scripting this guide inform your educating within the theater and English programs you’re main at Portland State?

DPP: I’ve been pondering so much about how we will create areas that assist the subsequent era of creators at Portland State — whether or not it is within the arts or some other subject. Lin-Manuel studied the good works in his subject, and he additionally had assist from his faculties to make his personal work. So in my course on musical theater, college students select on the finish of the time period how they need to add their voice to the story of the American musical. Quite just a few have made fantastic proposals for their very own reveals that develop the canon: a musical mixing conventional Cambodian music with hip-hop, a musical drawing on comedian songs from Native American traditions, a musical representing psychological well being challenges in a therapeutic gentle, a musical about forming LGBTQ+ group in rural Oregon. Students current their concepts to their classmates, get suggestions and assist, and very often deliver their work into the world. That thrills me like nothing else.

KOS: What classes does Miranda’s story have to supply younger musicians, theater artists and college students within the arts who’re constructing the foundations of their careers?

DPP: From interviewing so lots of Lin-Manuel’s childhood associates, I realized that though he at all times needed to make artwork, he did not begin out because the strongest musician or singer or author or composer in his cohort. But he had a tremendous development mindset. He did not fear about whether or not what he may do as an adolescent was nearly as good because the masterpieces he admired. He simply made what he may along with his associates and trusted that by collaborating and iterating, it might get higher. And his studying curve was phenomenal. He internalized classes from everybody he labored with, difficult himself to develop his toolkit with every endeavor, and changing into a fountain of enthusiasm that drew the very best collaborators to his tasks. So the teachings I believe his story provides: you do not have to be born capable of make the artwork you need. But you may study from folks round you, develop as you go, and be the sunshine within the room.

Daniel Pollack-Pelzner will talk about the guide in a conversation with Lindsey Mantoan on Sunday, September 21 at 4:00 p.m. at Powell’s City of Books.