The University of Massachusetts Amherst Master of Fine Arts for Poets and Writers presents a reading by prize-winning poet Martín Espada on Thursday, November 8, 2018 at 8 p.m. in Memorial Hall, located at 134 Hicks Way. The reading is free and open to the public.
Espada, winner of the 2018 Academy of American Poets Fellowship and the 2018 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, has published almost 20 books as a poet, editor, essayist, and translator. His latest collection of poems from Norton is Vivas to Those Who Have Failed. Other books of poems include The Trouble Ball, The Republic of Poetry, Alabanza, A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen, Imagine the Angels of Bread, City of Coughing and Dead Radiators, and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands.
His many honors include the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, an American Book Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the PEN/Revson 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, Zapata’s Disciple, was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona, and has been issued in a new edition by Northwestern University Press. Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York. A former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston’s Latino community, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Espada is reading as part of the MFA program’s Visiting Writers Series. Celebrating its fifty-fourth year, the UMass Amherst MFA for Poets and Writers presents emerging and established writers of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction through its nationally renowned reading series. The Visiting Writers Series is sponsored by the MFA for Poets and Writers and the Juniper Initiative, and made possible by support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the University of Massachusetts Arts Council and the English Department.
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