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 Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1957.
He has published thirteen books in all as a poet, essayist, editor and
translator. His eighth collection of poems,
The Republic of Poetry,
was published by Norton in October, 2006. Of this new
collection, Samuel Hazo writes: “Espada unites in these poems the fierce
allegiances of Latin American poetry to freedom and glory with the
democratic tradition of Whitman, and the result is a poetry of fire and
passionate intelligence.” His last book,
Alabanza: New and
Selected Poems, 1982-2002 (Norton, 2003), received the
Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was named an
American Library Association Notable Book of the Year. An earlier
collection, Imagine
the Angels of Bread (Norton, 1996), won an American Book
Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Other books of poetry include
A Mayan Astronomer in
Hell’s Kitchen (Norton, 2000),
City of Coughing and
Dead Radiators (Norton, 1993), and
Rebellion is the Circle
of a Lover’s Hands (Curbstone, 1990). He has received
numerous awards and fellowships, including the Robert Creeley Award, the
Antonia Pantoja Award, an Independent Publisher Book Award, a Gustavus
Myers Outstanding Book Award, the Charity Randall Citation, the Paterson
Poetry Prize, the PEN/ Revson Fellowship and two NEA Fellowships. He
recently received a 2006 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
Fellowship. His poems have appeared in
The New Yorker, The New
York Times Book Review, Harper’s, The Nation, and
The Best American
Poetry. He has also published a collection of essays,
Zapata’s Disciple
(South End, 1998); edited two anthologies,
Poetry Like Bread: Poets
of the Political Imagination from Curbstone Press (Curbstone,
1994) and El Coro: A
Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry (University of
Massachusetts, 1997); and released an audiobook of poetry on CD, called
Now the Dead will
Dance the Mambo (Leapfrog, 2004). Much of his poetry arises
from his Puerto Rican heritage and his work experiences, ranging from
bouncer to tenant lawyer. Espada is a professor in the Department of
English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he teaches
creative writing and the work of Pablo Neruda. |