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News and Press Releases Renowned Latino Poet Martín Espada to Read at UCF Student Union
The author of fourteen books in all as a poet, editor and translator, MartÃn Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. He is of Puerto Rican descent, bilingual in Spanish and English, and his poetry dances back and forth between the two languages. With humor, anger, and a seemingly endless reservoir of memorable images, Espada writes about the dignity of working life, the long history of struggles for social justice across the hemisphere, and the potential for love and memory to transform suffering. Espada is an award-winning writer with a major national and international reputation and this is a rare opportunity to see him in person here in Central Florida. It is even better that his reading comes during Hispanic Heritage Month, which runs from September 15-October 15. His eighth book of poems, The Republic of Poetry, was published by Norton last year, received the 2007 Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Another 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 Alabanza: New and Selected Poems (Norton, 2003), 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 Charity Randall Citation, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Premio Fronterizo, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. His poems have appeared in the The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Harper's and The Nation. 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 called Now the Dead will Dance the Mambo (Leapfrog, 2004). His work has been translated into ten languages. A former tenant lawyer, Espada is now a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he teaches creative writing and the work of Pablo Neruda. His reading at UCF is free and open to the public, and is sponsored by the Burnett Honors College and the English Department Writers in the Sun series. Co-sponsors include the Hispanic American Students Association; Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies Program; College of Arts and Humanities; Office of Diversity Initiatives; Undergraduate Studies; and Student Development and Enrollment Services. More Info on Espada: | |
Thursday, October 11