Award-winning Latino poet to speak at University of St. Francis
Called "the Latino poet of his generation,” award-winning author Martín Espada will be the keynote speaker at the 16th annual Undergraduate Conference on English Language and Literature at the University of St. Francis.
The public is invited to presentations by Espada: “The Republic of Poetry: A Reading by Martín Espada” at 8 p.m. Friday, March 16. A reception and book signing follow the reading. “Speaking the Unspoken Places in Poetry: A Plenary Address by Martín Espada” will be at 9 a.m. Saturday, March 17. Both presentations will be in the university’s Moser Performing Arts Center auditorium. Admission is $10 for each presentation. For information, call (815) 740-3852.
Espada has published 13 books as a poet, editor or translator. His fifth book of poetry Imagine the Angels of Bread won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Another volume of poems, Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover's Hands won both the Paterson Poetry Prize and the PEN/Revson Fellowship, whose judges declared it “political poetry at its best...The greatness of Espada's art, like all great arts, is that it gives dignity to the insulted and the injured of the earth." His collection of poetry, A Mayan Astronomer in Hell's Kitchen, was called "an unforgettable journey to the underworld," earning praise for the poet as "the moral conscience for our nation."
Espada's poems have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Harper's, The Nation, The Pushcart Prize and The Best American Poetry.
Much of his writing arises from his Puerto Rican heritage and his work experiences, ranging from bouncer to tenant lawyer. He is the editor of Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination from Curbstone Press and El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry, which won a Gustavus Myers Center Outstanding Book Award. The recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Espada is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He was recently named the first Poet Laureate of Northampton, Mass.
The Undergraduate Conference on English Language and Literature presents a unique opportunity for undergraduate students to initiate scholarship and to interact, according to conference founder and coordinator, Marcia Marzec, USF professor of English. Students chair conference sessions and participate in discussions on papers. Topics of conference sessions include World Literature and Ideas, Female Characters and Feminist Readings, Contemporary Literature, Men & Masculinity
Medieval Literature, Shakespeare and American Literature, among others.
More than 110 colleges and universities from throughout the country have participated in the ELL conference, according to Marzec, including Bryn Mawr College, Harvard University, Northwestern University, University of Chicago, Vassar College, Yale University, along with Oxford University.
Previous speakers include prominent authors and poets, such as the late Illinois poet laureate Gwendolyn Brooks, Eavan Boland, Li-Young Lee, Benjamin Bagby, Tobias Woolf, Robert Creeley, Billy Collins, Edward Hirsch, Phillip Lopate, Valerie Martin and Marilyn Nelson.