WHAT: The University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA for Poets and Writers presents a reading by poet Martín Espada
WHEN:Thursday, November 8th at 8pm
WHERE: Memorial Hall, 134 Hicks Way, Amherst MA
Martín Espada, winner of the 2018 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, has published almost twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist, and translator. His latest collection of poems from Norton is called 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. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His other 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. A former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston's Latino community, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Of Espada's work, Paul Mariani writes, "Martín Espada is one of the few poets in our time who really matters, because his words matter, and the people and the world he writes about matter. One thinks of Neruda, of Whitman, of Philip Levine as one finds oneself caught up by the magic of Espada's voice."
Learn more about Martín Espada:
Interviews:
Poetry, Teaching, and Resistance (Indigo Radio)
Mad Love (PBS NewsHour)
Poems:
Vivas To Those Who Have Failed: The Paterson Silk Strike, 1913
Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper
You Got a Song, Man
This reading is free, accessible, and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase from Amherst Books.
To learn more about upcoming events in the Visiting Writers Series, like us on Facebook or visit us at www.umass.edu/englishmfa/visiting-writers-series.
