Martín Espada

Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist, and translator. His poetry books include Floaters, winner of the 2021 National Book Award and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016); The Trouble Ball (2011); The Republic of Poetry (2006), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Alabanza (2003). He is also the editor of What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (2019).

He has received numerous awards and fellowships including 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. 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.