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Fantasy Reading Series Featuring Martín Espada and Lauren Schmidt

Please join us for a reading by poets Martín Espada and Lauren Schmidt. August 7th is Espada's birthday, so come on down to Bowery to celebrate. There will be cake! This is also a celebration of Espada's newest book, Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016).

Martín Espada has published more than fifteen books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His new collection of poems from Norton is called Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016). Other books of poems include The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006), Alabanza (2003), A Mayan Astronomer in Hells Kitchen (2000), Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996), City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (1993) and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lovers Hands (1990). His many honors include the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, an American Book Award, 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, Zapatas Disciple (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona. A former tenant lawyer in Greater Bostons Latino community, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Lauren Schmidt is the author of three books: The Voodoo Doll Parade (2011), Psalms of the Dining Room (2011), a sequence of poems about her experience at a soup kitchen in Eugene, Oregon, and Two Black Eyes and a Patch of Hair Missing (2013). Her next collection, Filthy Labors, is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. Her work has appeared in such journals as The Progressive, New York Quarterly, and Rattle. Her awards include the Vilcek Prize for Poetry from the Bellevue Literary Review, the So to Speak Poetry Prize and the Neil Postman Prize for Metaphor. She received her MFA from Antioch University, serves as a Poet-a-in-the-Schools for the Paterson public school system, and teaches in the Development Studies Department at Passaic County Community College.