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Rhina P. Espaillat was born in the Dominican Republic, has lived
in the U. S. since the age of 7, and taught high school English in
New York City for several years. She writes poetry and prose both in English
and in her native Spanish. Her work has appeared in numerous
magazines, including Poetry, Sparrow, The Formalist and
The American Scholar, as
well as in some two dozen anthologies, including An
Introduc-tion to Poetry (Longman, 2001) edited by X. J.
Kennedy and Dana Gioia, and The Beacon Best of 2001
(Beacon, 2001) edited by Junot Diaz, A Formal Feeling Comes (Story
Line Press, 1994) and In Other Words: Literature by Latinas of
the United States (Arte Publico Press, 1994). She is a
frequent reader and speaker in the Boston area, and conducts
workshops at colleges and universities out of state as well.
Espaillat has four poetry collections in print: Lapsing to Grace (Bennett
& Kitchel, 1992); Where Horizons Go (Truman State
University Press, 1998), which won the 1998 T. S. Eliot
Prize; Rehearsing Absence (University of Evansville
Press), which won the 2001 Richard Wilbur Award; and Mundo y
Palabra/The World and the Word (Oyster River Press), a
bilingual chapbook. She also won the 1998 Howard Nemerov Award,
the Sparrow Sonnet Prize for 1997, three yearly prizes
from the Poetry Society of America, including the Cecil Hemley
Memorial Award in the year 2000, and the 2001 Der-Hovanessian
Translation Prize from the New England Poetry Club, among other
awards.
Espaillat lives in Newburyport, MA, with her sculptor husband. She coordinates the
Newburyport Art Association's Annual Poetry Contest, directs the
Powow River Poets and organizes that group's monthly reading
series. One of her recent community efforts has led to a cultural
collaboration with a group of Spanish-language poets, Tertulia
Pedro Mir, centered in the neighboring and heavily Hispanic city
of Lawrence. The two groups have conducted several bilingual
poetry readings, often including art and music as part of the
evening's activities, in both Lawrence and Newburyport, and
reciprocal visits between the creative writing groups of the local
high schools of both cities, under the sponsorship of the two
poetry organizations.
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