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Martín Espada
Celebrating his new book Floaters: Poems

Autographed copies for $26.95 available at our website www.moonstoneartscenter.com

Martín Espada is celebrating his new book Floaters: Poems ($26.95, W. W. Norton & Company, 978-0393541038).

“Vintage Espada―essential, topical, political, irrepressible; in his poems, mercy acquires muscle and close attention confers value―reminding us that protest and praise rise from the same source. Such eloquence in comradeship, elegy and homage to those who lit the path, and, oh, a fresh bounty of love poems, written ‘not in lust but in astonishment.’” — Eleanor Wilner

Floaters takes its title from a term used by certain Border Patrol agents to describe migrants who drown trying to cross over. The title poem responds to the viral photograph of Óscar and Valeria, a Salvadoran father and daughter who drowned in the Río Grande, and allegations posted in the “I’m 10-15” Border Patrol Facebook group that the photo was faked.

Espada bears eloquent witness to confrontations with anti-immigrant bigotry as a tenant lawyer years ago, and now sings the praises of Central American adolescents kicking soccer balls over a barbed wire fence in an internment camp founded on that same bigotry. He also knows that times of hate call for poems of love―even in the voice of a cantankerous Galápagos tortoise.

Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator, including Vivas to Those Who Have Failed and Pulitzer finalist The Republic of Poetry. His many honors include the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Born in Brooklyn, he now lives in western Massachusetts.

Afaa M. Weaver (尉雅風)

“Afaa Michael Weaver reaffirms the value and necessity of a worker’s poetics in his latest collection, Spirit Boxing. Here, work is not celebrated for its own sake or merely derided as drudgery but is considered as a primary source of hardship, solidarity, pain, pride, and joy.”  —the Literary Review

Born in 1951 in Baltimore, Maryland, he spent fifteen years (1970-85) working in factories and developing himself as a poet, editor, and free-lance journalist. Near the end of that period, he received a 1985 NEA in poetry. He has published fifteen books of poetry, the most recent of which is Spirit Boxing. From 1997 to 2001, he was the editor of Obsidian III. His awards include the 1993 PDI playwriting award, multiple Pushcarts, a 2002 Fulbright at National Taiwan University, the Beijing Writers’ Gold Friendship medal in 2005, the 2014 Kingsley Tufts, the 2015 Phyllis Wheatley award, and a 2017 Guggenheim. In 2019, Afaa was given two lifetime achievement awards, from the St. Botolph Club Foundation in Boston and in Taiwan the 96th National Medal in Art & Literature. His poetry has been translated into Arabic and Chinese. Afaa is a lifelong student of Chinese language and culture. In 2017, he retired from Simmons U, after twenty years holding the Alumnae Endowed Chair. He now teaches at Sarah Lawrence.