Connections Literary Series: Martin Espada and Lauren Marie Schmidt
September 15, 2022
12:00 PM - 02:00 PM
(NEW LOCATION) La Plata Campus, Center for Business and Industry (BI Building), Room 113 and Online via Zoom
September 15, 2022
Poets Martin Espada and Lauren Marie Schmidt
12 p.m.
(NEW LOCATION) La Plata Campus, Center for Business and Industry (BI Building), Room 113 and Online via Zoom
Martín Espada has published more than 20 books as a poet, editor, essayist, and translator. His new book of poems from Norton, “Floaters,” is the winner of the 2021 National Book Award. His other poetry collections include “Vivas to Those Who Have Failed” (2016), “The Trouble Ball” (2011), “The Republic of Poetry” (2006), “Alabanza” (2003), “A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen” (2000), “Imagine the Angels of Bread” (1997), “City of Coughing and Ashes” (1993), and “Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands” (1990). He is the editor of “What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump” (2019). 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 University. A former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. www.martinespada.net
Lauren Marie Schmidt is the author of “Filthy Labors” and 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 in journals such as “North American Review,” “Alaska Quarterly Review,” “Rattle,” “Nimrod,” “Painted Bride Quarterly,” “PANK,” “New York Quarterly,” “Bellevue Literary Review,” “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. “Filthy Labors” chronicles her volunteer teaching experience at a transitional housing program for homeless women in her native New Jersey. www.laurenmarieschmidt.com/about.html nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810134690/filthy-labors