Acclaimed Poet and Professor Martín Espada Receives 2024 Governor’s Award in the Humanities from Mass Humanities

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Acclaimed poet and UMass Amherst professor of English Martín Espada has been named the recipient of the Mass Humanities 2024 Governor’s Award in the Humanities. The annual award honors a select few individuals that have had a tremendous impact on the Commonwealth through their work in the humanities. 

Espada was selected 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. He will be recognized at the Governor’s Awards in the Humanities ceremony, which will take place Thursday, Sept. 26, at 6:30 p.m. at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. 

In an interview with Mass Humanities, Espada reflects on his meaningful history with the organization. Following his graduation from Northeastern University Law School in Boston, Espada worked for a nonprofit, public interest law firm called Multicultural Education Training and Advocacy that staged poetry conferences and festivals geared toward the Latino community. But they needed support. They found it in David Tebaldi, former executive director of Mass Humanities.  

“David Tebaldi came through big time,” Espada says. “For the first time, we had a budget. David Tebaldi was the first person with any state agency who recognized what we were trying to do. And we did it. Then we went back to the well for more money. We began our ‘cultural advocacy’ with a focus on Puerto Rican literature and political struggle, then expanded to the Latino community and communities of color in Greater Boston. When I saw that this award came from Mass Humanities, what clicked was the memory of David Tebaldi and those grants he gave us to do our work in the eighties.” 

A celebrated advocate for social justice, Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His latest book of poems, "Floaters,” is the 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).  

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, 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.