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Acclaimed poet and professor of English Martín Espada has been named the recipient of the Mass Humanities 2024 Governor’s Award in the Humanities, an award that honors a select few individuals who have made 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.

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. Espada’s 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 also edited the collection “What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump” (2019).

Espada has also been the recipient of 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 and the title poem of his collection “Alabanza,” about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed.