Intended Audience
The Office of the President & the VOICES Reading Series Present: An Evening to Honor the Legacy of Lucille Clifton
The evening will feature a combined poetry reading and moderated discussion with poets Martin Espada and John Murillo reading selections from their works while honoring the legacy of Lucille Clifton, Maryland's former Poet Laureate who taught at St. Mary's College for more than 15 years. At the event, John Murillo will receive the 2024 Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. The event is free of charge and open to the public. Ticket registration required.
A reception will precede the event, beginning at 6:00 p.m. in the Dodge Performing Arts Center lobby. Tickets aren't required for reception.
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 Massachusetts 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), "Alabanza" (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 Lilly 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 "Alabanza," about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed. His book of essays and poems, "Zapata’s Disciple" (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program 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. http://www.martinespada.net/
John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections "Up Jump the Boogie" (Four Way Books 2020; Cypher 2010), finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Pen Open Book Award, and "Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry" (Four Way 2020), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Poetry Society of Virginia’s North American Book Award, and finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and the NAACP Image Award. His many honors include the Four Quartets Prize from the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the Poetry Society of America, two Larry Neal Writers Awards, a pair of Pushcart Prizes, the J Howard and Barbara MJ Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Fine Arts Work Center, Cave Canem, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Recently, his poems appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, and Best American Poetry 2017, 2019, and 2020. He is an associate professor of English at Wesleyan University.