The Puerto Rican Literature Project

Martín Espada was born in 1957 in Brooklyn, New York, and is a poet, essayist, educator, translator, and attorney. He earned his bachelor of arts degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1981 and his Juris Doctor from Northeastern University in 1985. His work addresses themes of social justice, human rights, and the experiences of Latino immigrants in the United States. He has published more than a dozen poetry books, including The Immigrant Iceboy's Bolero (Waterfront Press, 1982), Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover's Hands (Curbstone Press, 1990), Imagine the Angels of Bread (W.W. Norton, 1996), Crucifixion in the Plaza de Armas (Smokestack Books, 2008), La Tumba de Buenaventura Roig (Terranova Editores, 2008), The Trouble Ball: Poems (W.W. Norton, 2011), and Floaters: Poems (W.W. Norton, 2021), among others. He has also edited anthologies such as Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination (Curbstone Press, 1994) and What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (Northwestern University Press, 2019). His books of essays include Zapata's Disciple: Essays (South End Press, 1998 & Northwestern University Press, 2016) and The Necessary Poetics of Atheism (with Lauren Schmidt and Jeremy Schraffenberger, Twelve Winters Press, 2016). Throughout his career, Espada has received numerous awards, including the Pushcart Prize in 1999, the Robert Creeley Award in 2004, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award in 2008, the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006, the Shelley Memorial Award in 2013, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2018, among others. Espada has been a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst since 1993 and has worked as a lawyer in a legal clinic for low-income tenants in Chelsea, Massachusetts.

Works Cited

Espada, Martín. Interview. Conducted by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, 30 July 2021.

“Martín Espada.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/martin-espada.

“Martín Espada.” Poets.org, Academy of American Poets, 2016, poets.org/poet/martin-espada.