Brooklyn-born poet Martin Espada is reconciling words with meaning
Brooklyn BookBeat
Martin Espada is prolific. He has published almost 20 books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. He practiced law as a tenant lawyer in Greater Boston’s Latino Community. He works as a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He holds many honors such as the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award and the PEN/Revson Fellowship, to name a few.
He is also a Brooklyn boy. He says his parents’ courtship “basically happened at Ebbets Field,” home of the Brooklyn Dodgers. They even announced their engagement in the pages of the Brooklyn Eagle.
The Eagle spoke to Espada to learn more about his Brooklyn roots, the bridge between personal and political and the role of the poet to reconcile words with meaning in “an age of hyper-euphemism.”