The Simmons University Department of Literature & Writing invites you to a poetry reading by the 2021 National Book Award winner, Martín Espada. Espada will read from his award-winning book, Floaters, the title of which references a term border patrol officers apply to migrants. Espada’s reading will engage timely concerns of immigration, racism, and the politics and aesthetics of poetry.
Join us in person or online to listen in to the reading and take part in a live Q&A. This event is part of the Literature & Writing Department's annual Robert M. Gay Memorial lecture series and will be moderated by Professor Richard Wollman. The department will be raffling autographed copies of the book to registered participants of the event.
Hosted by The Department of Literature & Writing and the Gwen Ifill College of Media, Arts, and Humanities. Co-sponsored by the Office of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships and Eileen Friars '72.
About Martín Espada
Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His latest book of poems is called Floaters, winner of the 2021 National Book Award. Other books of poems include Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016), The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006) and Alabanza (2003). He is the editor of What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (2019). He has received 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. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The title poem of his collection Alabanza, about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed. 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. Learn more at martinespada.net.
Registration is required for this event.