Lowell Lecture
Martín Espada: Floaters and other poems
Date & Time
April 14, 2021 at 7 p.m.
Location
Virtual
, MA
Driving Directions
Speaker(s)
Martín Espada
Presenting Organization
Topics
Contact
Chandler Shaw (shawcp@bc.edu, )
Martín Espada has published almost twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His latest collection of poems from W.W. Norton is entitled Floaters (2021). Other books of poems include Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016), The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006), and others. His many honors include the 2018 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, 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. His book of essays, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), 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. A former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston’s Latino community, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Of Floaters, Publishers Weekly writes, "Martín Espada combines a sharp political awareness with a storyteller’s knack for finding beauty and irony in the current moment. Espada writes on an immigrant experience, in which 'We smuggle ourselves across a border of a demagogue’s dreams' and 'In the full moon of the flashlight, every face is the face of Guillermo.' His poems challenge the idea of an invented immigrant other,...and reassert the humanity of the marginalized." This reading will be followed by a moderated discussion and audience Q&A.