Martín Espada, National Book Award winning poet and University of Massachusetts, Amherst Professor, will visit WPI on April 17 to give a public reading from his award-winning Floaters (2021) and from his newest book, Jailbreak of Sparrows, published April 2025.
Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist, and translator. His latest book of poems Jailbreak of Sparrows was published with Knopf in 2025. His previous book, Floaters, won the National Book Award for Poetry and a Massachusetts Book Award. His poetry collections from W.W. Norton include Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016), The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006), Alabanza (2003) and Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996). 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, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, a Letras Boricuas Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. 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. A former tenant lawyer, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Espada's reading during National Poetry Month is hosted and organized by WPI's George C. Gordon Library in collaboration with the WPI School of Arts & Sciences, the Worcester County Poetry Association, the Gregory Stockmal Reading Fund at the Greater Worcester Community Foundation, and the Clemente Course in the Humanities.
The event inaugurates a planned annual celebration of poetry at WPI made possible by the Gordon Library’s Olive Higgins Prouty Endowment for the Humanities. Olive Higgins Prouty (1882-1974), a Worcester native, was a poet, and a novelist who authored Now, Voyager and Stella Dallas. She was also noted for her philanthropic work that included her support for poet Sylvia Plath.
The reading will take place in the Great Hall of Higgins House, and begin at 4:00 pm with a reception and book sale and signing afterward in the Higgins garden lounge.
The event is free to the public.
For more information, please contact the WPI Library at: library@wpi.edu.