Before Martín Espada was a 2007 Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Republic of Poetry or, for that matter, before he won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2018 for outstanding lifetime achievement and recognition of his contribution to poetry, he was a tenant lawyer in Greater Boston’s Latino community. The experience barges through in a searing poem, Jumping Off the Mystic Tobin Bridge, from his forthcoming collection Floaters, due out in January 2021. And it did so again in his recent Op-Ed piece in The Boston Globe, linking racism to the devastation among the residents of Chelsea by the Covid-19 pandemic. Martin Espada is the featured speaker for South End Writes via Zoom on Tuesday, July 14, at 6:30 PM. He will read from the 2021 Floaters; the 2016 Vivas to Those Who Have Failed, winner of the 2017 Massachusetts Center for the Book Poetry Award; and his 2019 anthology, What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump, featuring 93 poets, including Danielle Legros George, Richard Blanco and Donald Hall.

The poet will be introduced by South End State Rep., Jon Santiago.

(Zoom contact information is at the bottom of this page).

Espada grew up in New York City, the son of Frank Espada, a documentary photographer and civil rights activist born in Puerto Rico. Now a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst., Martin Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator, among them The Trouble Ball (2011),  Alabanza (2003), A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (2000), Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996), City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (1993) and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (1990). His many honors also include the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, an American Book Award, a 2018 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Espada was the first Latino recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, sponsored by the Poetry Foundation, since it was founded more than three decades ago.

A 1998 book of essays and poems by Espada about social injustice, Zapada’s Disciple, was banned in Arizona and Texas. A new edition by Northwestern University Press won the 1999 Independent Publisher Book Award for Essay / Creative Nonfiction.

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To join the July 14 ZOOM meeting:

Topic: South End Writes hosts poet Martin Espada
Time: Jul 14, 2020 06:30 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82175584426?pwd=ZVZRTkdDKzhaSmIzaXVJZnpUS1hjZz09

Meeting ID: 821 7558 4426
Password: 141323
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