Martín Espada

Biography

Martín Espada has published more than twenty books. His latest collection of poems is Floaters (Norton, 2021), winner of the 2021 National Book Award and the Massachusetts Book Award, and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He has also received the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, a Letras Boricuas Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His collection Jailbreak of Sparrows is forthcoming (Knopf, 2025).

Headshot by Lauren Marie Schmidt

See Work

POETRY / Fiction 2024

The Snake

By Martín Espada
POETRY / Fall 2023

Isabela’s Red Dress Flutters Away

By Martín Espada
POETRY / Fall 2023

The Iguanas Skitter Through the Cemetery by the Sea

By Martín Espada
POETRY / Winter 2022

Big Bird Died for Your Sins

By Martín Espada

Barry was six-foot-six, fifteen like me, floating layups and hook shots
over our heads through the hoop in my driveway. We called him Big Bird
for dwarfing us, for his slappy feet, for the mouth that hung in a grin at all

POETRY / Winter 2022

Look at This

By Martín Espada

My father spoke: Look at this, he said to me. We were walking through
an alley from somewhere to somewhere else in Brooklyn. In front of us,
a man with white hair and a white beard reached into a dumpster,
plucked out a bag of potato chips...

POETRY / Winter 2022

Award Ceremony Nightmare With Swedish Meatballs

By Martín Espada

I was sitting at a banquet table before the awards ceremony. 
A distinguished character actor, who narrated the PBS documentary
I saw last night, entered the banquet hall in a white jacket.

POETRY / Winter 2022

Love Song of the Disembodied Head in a Jar

By Martín Espada

Like the pirates and revolutionaries of legend, heads spiked
atop the great bridge spanning the great city, I am now a head
without a body. Maybe the body ran away while I was sleeping,
slamming headless into walls and doors. Maybe my body...