SOMOS News:
The Society of the Muse of the Southwest (SOMOS), a literary organization in Taos since 1983, is hosting Martin Espada for a reading and workshop April 12-13, 2024.
Both will be held online via Zoom and the link will be forwarded after registration.
Espada has published more than 20 books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His new book of poems from Norton is called Floaters, winner of the 2021 National Book Award. Other books of poems include Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016), The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006) and Alabanza (2003).
He is the editor of What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (2019). He 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 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 and reissued by Northwestern. A former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
His reading at 5:30 p.m. Friday, April 12, will feature poems from Floaters, as well as other new work. His workshop 9 a.m. to noon Saturday, April 13 is titled “My Last Name”. This is a generative workshop. Through the example of a great Afro-Cuban poet, Nicolás Guillén, and the voices of the poets in the workshop, he will explore ancestors, family, culture, history, language, memory, the known and the unknown, the spoken and the unspoken, elements that make up “identity”. Poets will write on the spot, then read their poems aloud—not for critical feedback, but only for thunderous applause.
For further information and registration, go to: www.somostaos.org/classes-workshops, or call 575.758.0081 or email somos@somostaos.org
