Martín Espada

Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His latest book of poems is called “Floaters”, winner of the 2021 National Book Award. Other books of poems include “Vivas to Those Who Have Failed” (2016), “The Trouble Ball” (2011), “The Republic of Poetry” (2006) and “Alabanza” (2003). He is the editor of “What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump” (2019). He has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, a Letras Boricuas Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. “The Republic of Poetry” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The title poem of his collection “Alabanza”, about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed. His book of essays and poems, “Zapata’s Disciple” (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona. A former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.