The Poetry Foundation has presented Martín Espada with the 2018 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. He is the first Latinx poet to win this award since its inception in 1986.
The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize is one of the most prestigious awards given to American poets and, with a prize of $100,000, one of the nation’s largest literary prizes. The award is sponsored by the Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine.
“Martín Espada’s work and life tell the story of America, in which the importance of poems and legal rights go hand in hand,” said Don Share, editor of Poetry magazine. “A tenants’ rights attorney before he became a celebrated poet, Espada’s passions are as compelling and apt as his precisions—both now more timely than ever.”
As a poet, an essayist, an editor, and a translator, he has dedicated himself to the pursuit of social justice, fighting for the rights of Latinx communities. His greatest influence is his father, Frank Espada, a community organizer, civil rights activist, and documentary photographer who created the Puerto Rican Diaspora Documentary Project.
“To receive a lifetime achievement award in the form of the Ruth Lilly Prize is a great honor that causes me to reflect on my father, as artist and activist, who died four years ago; on Jack Agüeros, the first poet I ever met; on the days I sat outside the courtroom, scribbling poems on legal pads; on the people in the poems I write, Whitman’s ‘numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known.'”
Espada’s collection of poems include A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (2000). The title poem of his collection Alabanza, about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed. His book of essays, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), was banned as part of Mexican American studies outlawed by the state of Arizona and has been issued in a new edition by Northwestern University Press.
Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1957. He earned a BA in history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a JD from Northeastern. As an attorney, he served as supervisor of Su Clínica Legal, a legal services program for low-income, Spanish-speaking tenants in Chelsea, Massachusetts, outside Boston. Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
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