The Montclair Monthly Poetry Series Continues

The Montclair Monthly Poetry Series, coordinated by Laura Boss and Maria Mazziotti Gillan, is presenting a reading by Martín Espada and Lauren Schmidt on Thursday, December 4, 2014.

The free event will be held on Thursday December 4 at 7:00 p.m. at the Montclair Public Library (auditorium), 50 South Fullerton Ave., Montclair, NJ.

An open reading will follow the featured readers.

About the Poets

Called by Sandra Cisneros “the Pablo Neruda of North American authors,” Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. He has published more than fifteen books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator.

His forthcoming collection of poems is called The Leaves of El Moriviví (2016). Other books of poems include The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006), Alabanza (2003), A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (2000), Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996) and City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (1993).

Espada’s many honors include the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, an American Book Award, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The title poem of his collection Alabanza, about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed.

His book of essays, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), has been banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona. A graduate of Northeastern University Law School and a former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston’s Latino community, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Lauren Schmidt is the author of three collections of poetry: Two Black Eyes and a Patch of Hair Missing; The Voodoo Doll Parade, selected for the Main Street Rag Author’s Choice Chapbook Series; and Psalms of The Dining Room, a sequence of poems about her volunteer experience at a soup kitchen in Eugene, Oregon.

Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Rattle, Nimrod, PANK, New York Quarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, and The Progressive. Her awards include the So to Speak Poetry Prize, the Neil Postman Prize for Metaphor, The Janet B. McCabe Prize for Poetry, and the Bellevue Literary Review’sVilcek Prize for Poetry. Schmidt is an Instructor of Developmental English at Passaic County Community College and a Poet-in-the-Schools for Paterson Public Schools.

Information and photo courtesy of Montclair Poetry Series