Martín Espada ’85 Honored with Mass Humanities Governor’s Award

Martín Espada ’85 will be honored with a 2024 Mass Humanities Governor’s Award, which recognizes individuals whose public actions enhance civic life in the commonwealth through a deep appreciation of the humanities. Espada has been singled out for his “work as a poet, editor and essayist with a focus on using writing and storytelling to address pressing issues and reclaim historical narratives, including those of the Puerto Rican community in Massachusetts.”

Martín Espada ’85 Honored with Mass Humanities Governor’s Award
Martín Espada ’85

04.24.24 — Martín Espada ’85 will be honored with a 2024 Mass Humanities Governor’s Award, which recognizes individuals whose public actions enhance civic life in the commonwealth through a deep appreciation of the humanities. Mass Humanities, a nonprofit foundation based in Northampton, has partnered with the Massachusetts Office of the Governor on the Governor’s Awards in the Humanities since 2014. The foundation will honor Espada and three other recipients on Thursday, September 26, 2024, at a ceremony presented in partnership with Governor Maura Healey ’98 at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. Espada has been singled out for his “work as a poet, editor and essayist with a focus on using writing and storytelling to address pressing issues and reclaim historical narratives, including those of the Puerto Rican community in Massachusetts.”

“I am thrilled to present the 2024 Governor’s Awards in the Humanities to these four incredible honorees,” said Healey. “The humanities make up the cornerstone of Massachusetts culture. These four leadershave made significant contributions to the arts, education, civil rights, philanthropy and so much more. On behalf of the state, I share my immense gratitude for their work and congratulate them on today’s recognition.”

Espada, a former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston, is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He has published more than 20 books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His latest book of poems is called Floaters, winner of the 2021 National Book Award and the Massachusetts Book Award, and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Other books of poems 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, the Robert Creeley Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, a Letras Boricuas 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.

Past Mass Humanities Governor’s Award include: Professor Margaret Burnham, Callie Crossley, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., J. Hubie Jones, Margaret Marshall, Atul Gawande, Ellen Dunlap, Jessie Little Doe Baird and Sonia Nieto, among others.

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