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

Visiting PSU scholar Daniel Pollack-Pelzner - who teaches theater history and English courses in the College of the Arts and College of Liberal Arts and Sciences - recently published "Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist" (Simon & Schuster, September 2025), exploring the influences that shaped the iconic creator of the Broadway musicals "Hamilton" and "In the Heights."

This remarkable book, which has received national coverage in the New York Times, National Public Radio, and more, offers an intimate, behind-the-scenes look at Miranda's creative origin story, drawing on over 150 interviews with his family, friends, and collaborators - and many with Miranda himself. Packed with sweet, funny, illuminating and heart-tugging anecdotes from Miranda's early years, the book explores the idea that the artist isn't a "born genius," but rather a tireless, relentlessly curious creator and empathetic collaborator who has never shrunk from an opportunity to experiment, fail and learn.

We had the chance to talk with Pollack-Pelzner about the project this month.

KOS: How did you come to write this biography? How has your career put you on the road to meet Lin-Manuel Miranda and receive the incredible opportunity to write a book about his life?

DPP: I've been a musical theater nut since I was a kid growing up in Portland in the '80s. My dad waited tables, and on Saturday nights, after I helped him put out the place settings, my mom would take me to the video store to rent a movie of a Broadway show from her own childhood. I remember crying at the end of West Side Story. I was in The Sound of Musicat Lincoln High School, down the street from PSU, and I loved going to shows at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival every summer. But it wasn't until I became a Shakespeare professor and returned to Portland after grad school that I started wondering who our Shakespeares might be today. I started writing profiles of living playwrights for The New Yorker, and that led me to see "Hamilton"when it opened in 2015. Like just about everyone, I fell in love. I tracked it around the world, reporting on its shifting significance in London and Puerto Rico. And every time I interviewed Lin-Manuel Miranda, I was struck at how he credited his teachers for helping him become an artist. He always talked about choosing his next projects based on what he could learn from his collaborators. As a teacher myself, that moved me. I thought perhaps I could write a book about his education that might help to inspire my own students. I sent him a proposal with the unabashedly cringy subject line: "Who tells your story?" To my surprise and delight, he invited me to meet.

KOS: It's so rare for a theater artist to become a household name. Why do you think Miranda's work resonates so deeply with people - even with those who've never attended a Hamilton performance or belted a Broadway tune in their lives?

DPP: Lin-Manuel has always wanted 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 1990s. He was thrilled at a show that sounded like the music he and his friends listened to on their Walkmans and that looked like the people he saw on the A train in Manhattan. That's what he wanted to create, too, and I think his songs, which bring hip-hop and Latin music and pop into musical theater structures, draw in a lot of people who might not otherwise listen to show tunes. He also jokes that since he's not a great piano player, his melodies have to be really simple and catchy to make it through his fingers! I was astonished at how many of his high school classmates could still sing the number from his eleventh-grade musical, "Nightmare in D Major," that he wrote for the ghost of a fetal pig who seeks vengeance on the student 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 more importantly, he writes songs as an actor, seeking the emotional core of his characters' struggles. He trusts that if he can identify with a character, his audience will, too. When he wrote a song about Hamilton grieving the death of his son in a duel, he remembered the death of one of his own childhood friends and how unfathomable, how inexpressible, her parents' grief must feel. That became 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 on your many conversations with Miranda's family, colleagues, and friends, what are the defining characteristics that make him the artist and human he has become?

I started out expecting to write a book about an artist's craft, and Lin-Manuel delivered. He loves talking about the influences he synthesizes: he studies Jay-Z's flow, Stephen Sondheim's reprises, Rubén Blades's socially conscious storytelling, and he figures out how to make those forces his own. I knew he he's always been a tremendous collaborator, eager to find and support partners who have skills he doesn't (writing sheet music, playing instruments, hitting high notes). But I was surprised to learn how much Lin-Manuel's strength comes from his emotional vulnerability as well. He was an extremely sensitive child. He cried if he saw an unhoused person on the street. He cried when the news was on. He cried at the chord changes in "Bridge Over Troubled Water." His dad wanted to toughen him up, to protect him from bullies at school. He even got Lin-Manuel a boxing puppet to teach him to fight back. That wasn't Lin-Manuel's style. "No fighting!" he'd protest when the puppet came out. It was his mother, a child psychologist, who taught him that it was alright to feel deeply, and that, in fact, it would make him a better artist. "You want to be a writer?" his mother would tell him. "Remember this feeling. You'll use it someday. It's all grist for the mill." He says that's what allowed him, years later, to find his way into the emotional lives of Aaron Burr and Eliza Hamilton and Moana. (He suggested that I title this biography "Grist for the Mill.")

KOS: How has Miranda's cultural identity as Puerto Rican, combined with his experience growing up in New York City, contributed to his creative approach, and his public persona?

DPP: Lin-Manuel says he's been code-switching since kindergarten, when he left his immigrant neighborhood at the northernmost tip of Manhattan and started at Hunter College Elementary School, a magnet program on the mostly white Upper East Side. He became "Lin" at school and "Lin-Manuel" at home, wondering how these two selves could fit together. He was also very conscious that Puerto Ricans on Broadway tended to be portrayed as knife-wielding gang members. Eager to bring some facet of his family's culture to school, he directed a student production of "West Side Story"in his senior year at Hunter, the same year that Broadway saw Paul Simon's short-lived musical "The Capeman," which also depicted Puerto Ricans as gang fighters stabbing white people. When Lin-Manuel went to college, he lived in a Latino cultural house, surrounded for the first time at school with other children of immigrants who toggled between cultures. It was the late 1990s, the era of the so-called "Latin boom" in pop music. He decided to write a musical about immigrants who worked hard and cared for their families, singing salsa and merengue and hip-hop, set in the Washington Heights neighborhood near his parents' home. At the end of his sophomore year, he directed the fledgling version of what later became his first Broadway hit: "In the Heights."

KOS: What did you learn from him and his experiences that you have applied to your own work?

DPP: When I was in college and grad school, I felt cripplingly precious about my writing. I didn't want to put anything down on the page unless it was perfect. And so often, I didn't put anything down at all. That's a terrible practice for creating anything good! What I learned from Lin-Manuel's career was that you don't have to get it right the first time. Even though he wrote a version of "In the Heights"as a college sophomore, not a single word or note of that script remained in the version that opened eight years later on Broadway (except for the title phrase, "In Washington Heights!"). He rewrote every song, every scene, every line. That helped me get over my inhibiting perfectionism. I saw that even works of art I admired didn't come into the world fully formed. What made them good wasn't their initial execution; it was the process of collaboration and revision that Lin-Manuel welcomes. ("Editing is his superpower" his wife told me.) Learning that allowed me to trust the revision process, too. All I had to do was get down a first draft of what I learned so that my editors and readers and friends could help me make it better.

KOS: How does your research and experience writing this book inform your teaching in the theater and English courses you're leading at Portland State?

DPP: I've been thinking a lot about how we can create spaces that support the next generation of creators at Portland State -- whether it's in the arts or any other field. Lin-Manuel studied the great works in his field, and he also had support from his schools to make his own work. So in my course on musical theater, students choose at the end of the term how they want to add their voice to the story of the American musical. Quite a few have made wonderful proposals for their own shows that expand the canon: a musical blending traditional Cambodian music with hip-hop, a musical drawing on comic songs from Native American traditions, a musical representing mental health challenges in a healing light, a musical about forming LGBTQ+ community in rural Oregon. Students present their ideas to their classmates, get feedback and support, and quite often bring their work into the world. That thrills me like nothing else.

KOS: What lessons does Miranda's story have to offer young musicians, theater artists and students in the arts who are building the foundations of their careers?

DPP: From interviewing so many of Lin-Manuel's childhood friends, I learned that although he always wanted to make art, he didn't start out as the strongest musician or singer or writer or composer in his cohort. But he had an amazing growth mindset. He didn't worry about whether what he could do as a teenager was as good as the masterpieces he admired. He just made what he could with his friends and trusted that by collaborating and iterating, it would get better. And his learning curve was phenomenal. He internalized lessons from everyone he worked with, challenging himself to expand his toolkit with each endeavor, and becoming a fountain of enthusiasm that drew the best collaborators to his projects. So the lessons I think his story offers: you don't have to be born able to make the art you want. But you can learn from people around you, grow as you go, and be the light in the room.

Daniel Pollack-Pelzner will discuss the book in a conversation with Lindsey Mantoanon Sunday, September 21 at 4:00 p.m. at Powell's City of Books.