HOME: Poetry workshop series

Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York. He has published more than 20 books as a poet, editor, essayist, and translator. His forthcoming book of poems from Norton is called, "Floaters". Other books of poems include, "Vivas to Those Who Have Failed" (2016), "The Trouble Ball" (2011), "The Republic of Poetry" (2006), "Alabanza" (2003), "A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen" (2000), "Imagine the Angels of Bread" (1996), and "City of Coughing and Dead Radiators" (1993). 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, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, an American Book Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. 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, and reissued by Northwestern. A former tenant lawyer, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

The theme for April is "My Last Name". This is a generative workshop. Through the example of a great Afro-Cuban poet and the voices of the poets in workshop, we will explore ancestors, family, culture, history, memory, the known and unknown, the spoken and unspoken, elements that make up what we call “identity.” Poets will write on the spot, wherever they may be, then read their poems aloud — not for critical feedback, but for thunderous applause.

Rajiv Mohabir is the author of "The Cowherd’s Son" (Tupelo Press 2017, winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize; Eric Hoffer Honorable Mention 2018) and "The Taxidermist’s Cut" (Four Way Books 2016, winner of the Four Way Books Intro to Poetry Prize, Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry in 2017), and translator of "I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara" (1916) (Kaya Press 2019, winner of the 2020 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets), which received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant Award. His memoir, "ANTIMAN", won the 2019 Reckless Books’ New Immigrant Writing Prize and is forthcoming 2021. Currently he is an Assistant Professor of poetry in the MFA program at Emerson College, and translations editor at Waxwing Journal.

A description of the workshop will be posted here soon.