from my email, via Daniel Borzutzky--a reading 10/30: Martin Espada

Please join us and spread the word about this event and museum tour at the Hull House on October 30! Reading starts at 6 pm. Liesl Olson, Hull House Director, will be giving a museum tour at 5 pm.

Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His latest book of poems from Norton is called Floaters, winner of the 2021 National Book Award. Other books of poems include Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016), The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006) and Alabanza (2003). 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, 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. The title poem of his collection Alabanza, about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed. 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 in Greater Boston, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Tilsa Otta (Lima, 1982) is a writer and video artist. She has published four books of poetry, one short story collection, one poetry book for children, and a comic book. In 2020 she published the novel Lxs niñxs de oro de la alquimia sexual. She also directs audiovisual pieces and gives workshops on poetic creation for children and adults. www.tilsaotta.com. Her new book, The Hormone Of Darkness (translated by Farid Matuk) is just out from Graywolf Press.

Lauren Marie Schmidt is the author of three previous collections of poetry: Two Black Eyes and a Patch of Hair Missing; The Voodoo Doll Parade, selected for the Main Street Rag Author’s Choice Chapbook Series; and Psalms of The Dining Room, a sequence of poems about her volunteer experience at a soup kitchen in Eugene, Oregon. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Rattle, The Florida Review, The MacGuffin, The Progressive, and others. Her awards include the So to Speak Poetry Prize, the Neil Postman Prize for Metaphor, The Janet B. McCabe Prize for Poetry, and the Bellevue Literary Review’s Vilcek Prize for Poetry. Her fourth collection, Filthy Labors, a finalist for the Brittingham/Pollak Poetry Prize, chronicles her volunteer teaching experience at a transitional housing program for homeless women in her native New Jersey. Currently, Schmidt runs a poetry workshop at New View, a court-mandated drug and alcohol rehabilitation program for women in Western Massachusetts, where she lives with her poet husband, Martín Espada, and teaches in the Humanities Department at The Academy at Charlemont. She recently finished her first novel and is represented by Julie Stevenson (Massie & McQuilkin). 

Farid Matuk is the author of the poetry collections This Isa Nice Neighborhood (Letter Machine Editions, 2010), The Real Horse (University of Arizona Press, 2018), and Moon Mirrored Indivisible(University of Chicago Press, 2025). With visual artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez, Matuk created the book-arts project Redolent, recipient of the 2023 Anna Rabinowitz Prize from the Poetry Society of America. From Spanish, Matuk has translated Tilsa Otta’s selected poems, publishing these under the title The Hormone of Darkness (Graywolf Press, 2024). His poems appear in The Paris Review, The Nation, Brooklyn Rail, Bomb magazine, Lana Turner Journal, Poetry magazine, among others, and they have been anthologized most recently in The Best American Experimental Poetry, Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora, and the Library of America’s Latino Poetry. Matuk’s work has been supported by residencies from the Headlands Center for the Arts, a visiting Holloway Lectureship in the Practice of Poetry at the University of California, Berkeley, and a 2024 USA Fellowship from United States Artists.