Martín Espada Biography
Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1957, to a Jewish mother and a Puerto Rican father. He is a poet, a professor and a former tenant lawyer. He first studied at the University of Wisconsin, where he received his bachelor of art degree in history and, shortly after, a juris doctor degree in law from Northeastern University in Boston. As a young man and before working as a lawyer he held numerous jobs. Therefore, he was working as a bouncer, bartender, salesman, gas station attendant, telephone solicitor and a clerk. Eventually he decided to abandon his law career in order to devote himself to his two biggest passions - writing and teaching.
Martín Espada is the author of a couple of very successful collections of poetry. For example, his poetry collection "The Republic of Poetry", published in 2006, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Furthermore, the collection "Alabanza: New and Selected Poems (1982-2002)", published in 2003, actually received the Peterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was also named an American Library Association Notable Book of the year. The newest collection that came out of Espada's pen this year is "The Trouble Ball: Poems."
Espada's earlier collections were successful and well accepted among the poetry audience as well. Therefore, it is important to highlight that his collection from the 1996, "Imagine the Angels of Bread", was a winner of the American Book Award, as well as a finalist for the national Book Critics Circle Award. Other titles from Espada's poetry collection include: "A Mayan Astronomer in Hell's Kitchen" (2000), "City of Coughing and Dead Radiators" (1993) and "Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover's Hands" (1990).
Poetry may be Espada's main preocupation, but is certainly not the only one. On top of everything else, he also published a collection of essays named "Zapata's Disciple", in 1998. Furthermore, he was the editor of two anthologies as well as the author of a CD of poetry, published by Leapfrog in 2004, named "Now the Dead will Dance the Mambo".
Within the circle of poets Martín Espada is known as the different one, as the one that decided not to take the well established ways in poetry, but to explore environments where "bus drivers, revolutionaries, the executed of El Salvador - sit, walk, or lie dead without heads", as described by the poet Gary Soto.
Espada's work brought him numerous awards. These are some of the ones that found their place in his biography - the Robert Creeley Award, the Antonia Pantoja Award, an Independent Publisher Book Award, a Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and two NEA Fellowships.
Today, Martín Espada works as a professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, in the Department of English. He is a teacher of Latino poetry and creative writing as well as the work of Pablo Neruda.