Martín Espada

Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist, and translator.

His latest book of poems is called Jailbreak of Sparrows (2025).

His previous book, Floaters, won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2021.

He is the editor of What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (2019).

Espada has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, a Letras Boricuas Fellowship, and a Guggenheim
Fellowship.

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.

A former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.