And Martín Espada, known as the “people’s poet,” has won the prestigious 2018 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, which honors a living U.S. poet for outstanding lifetime achievement. Espada is the first Latino poet to win the award since its inception in 1986. It comes with a $100,000 prize. The editor of Poetry Magazine said, “Martín Espada’s work and life tell the real and lived story of America, in which the importance of poems and legal rights go hand in hand.” This is Martín Espada reciting part of his poem “How We Could Have Lived or Died This Way,” about resistance to police brutality in the United States.

Martín Espada: ”I see the rebels marching, hands upraised before the riot squads, faces in bandannas against the tear gas, and I walk beside them unseen.
I see the poets, who will write the songs of insurrection generations unborn
will read or hear a century from now, words that make them wonder
how we could have lived or died this way, how the descendants of slaves
still fled and the descendants of slave-catchers still shot them, how we awoke
every morning without the blood of the dead sweating from every pore.”

That’s acclaimed “people’s poet” Martín Espada, who has become the first Latino poet to win the prestigious Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.