2012 Leidig Lectureship in Poetry

Martín Espada will be the featured author at the 2012 Leidig Lectureship in Poetry, which is scheduled for April 11-12.  He is the author, editor, or translator of seventeen books, including the poetry collections Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996), which won the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award; Alabanza: New and Selected Poems, 1982-2002 (2003); The Republic of Poetry (2006), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and The Trouble Ball (2011).  His books of essays include Zapata’s Disciple (1998) and The Lover of a Subversive Is Also a Subversive (2010), a volume in the University of Michigan’s Poets on Poetry series.  He has edited the anthology Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination (1994) and has translated The Blood That Keeps Singing, selected poems of Puerto Rican poet Clemente Soto Vélez.  The recipient of two NEA Creative Writing Fellowships, he has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship.  Born in Brooklyn and a former tenant lawyer, he now teaches in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Mr. Espada will read from his poetry on Wednesday, April 11, at 7:30 p.m. in the Board of Visitors Lounge in the Van Dyke Center.  On the evening of April 12, he will give a lecture at 7:30 in the same place. 

Both events are free, and the public is encouraged to attend.