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Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York. His numerous poetry collections from W. W. Norton & Company include Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016), The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006), Alabanza (2003), A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (2000), and Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996). He has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His book of essays, Zapata’s Disciple (SOUTH END PRESS,1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona. Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.