PoetryLife 2023: Celebrating Heritage - Afternoon Conversation with Poets

Martín Espada:

Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His latest book of poems is called Floaters, winner of the 2021 National 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), Albanza (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 Lily 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 Albanza, about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed. His book of essays and poems, Zapata's Disciple (1998), was outlawed by the state of Arizona. A former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Read more about Martín Espada .

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley:

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is an anti-war/human rights activist and a survivor of the First Liberian Civil War, immigrating to the US with her husband and small children in 1991. She is the author of six critically acclaimed books of poetry, including Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems (2020), When the Wanderers Come Home (2016), Where the Road Turns (2010) and The River is Rising (2007). She has published her poems, memoir articles and short stories in anthologies and literary magazines such as the Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, The New York Times Magazine and Transition. Her poetry has been translated into several languages. Jabbeh Wesley has won several literary awards, including the 2023 Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize; the 2022 Levinson Poetry Prize from Poetry Magazine for her two poems, "Black Woman Selling Her Home in America" and "Healing will Come: Elegy After Natural Disaster;" the Prairie Schooner 2022 Edward Stanley Prize for her poem, "My Name is Dawanyeno;" the Crab Orchard Award (2022); the Wise Women Award for Literary Arts (2016); and a Barack Obama Award from NAACP of Blair county, PA. Her newest publication, Breaking the Silence: Anthology of Liberian Poetry, is forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press in 2023. Jabbeh Wesley, whose funnier son says she needs to get "a real job," is Professor of English, Creative Writing and African Literature at Penn State-Altoona. Read more about Patricia Jabbeh Wesley .

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