Poet and educator Martín Espada was born in 1957 in Brooklyn, New York. He received his B.A. degree in history from the University of Wisconsin (1981) and a J.D. degree from Northeastern University School of Law (1985). He is currently (2003) a Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he teaches courses in creative writing, Latino poetry and the work of Pablo Neruda.
Espada has written extensively on the plight of Latinos in the United States and is an outspoken advocate for social justice in Latin America. Espada's father Frank Espada was a leader in the Puerto Rican community and in the U.S. civil rights movement. Martín Espada's published collections of poetry include: The Immigrant Iceboy's Bolero (1982), Trumpets from the Islands of their Eviction (1987), Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover's Hands (1990; winner of the PEN/Revson Fellowship and the Paterson Poetry Prize), City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (1993), Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996; winner of the American Book Award), A Mayan Astronomer in Hell's Kitchen (2000) and Alabanza: New and Selected Poems, 1982-2002 (2003). A book of essays, Zapata's Disciple (1998), received an Independent Publisher Book Award. He is the editor of two anthologies: Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination from Curbstone Press (1994), and El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry (1997), winner of a Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award. Other honors include a Massachusetts Artists' Foundation Fellowship, a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2001, he was named the first Poet Laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts.
Martín Espada married Katherine Gilbert in 1988. The couple has one son, Klemente Gilbert-Espada.
From the guide to the Martin Espada Papers, 1957-2006, (Amherst College Archives and Special Collections)
