Martín Espada

Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist, and translator. His new book of poems is called Jailbreak of Sparrows (2025). His previous book, Floaters, won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2021. Other poetry collections include Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016), The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006), Alabanza (2003) and Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996). He is the editor of What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (2019). Espada 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 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 with Su Clínica Legal in Greater Boston, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.