Rhina P. Espaillat

Rhina P. Espaillat was born in the Dominican Republic in 1932, has lived in the United States since 1939, and was educated in the public school system of New York City. She graduated from Hunter College and did graduate work at Queens College, a branch of the City University of New York. Espaillat taught high school English in New York City for several years, and writes poetry and prose both in English and in her native Spanish. Her poems, essays, narratives and translations have appeared in numerous magazines, on many websites, and in some fifty anthologies.

Espaillat has published eleven collections of her work: Lapsing to Grace; Where Horizons Go, which won the 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize; Rehearsing Absence, which won the 2001 Richard Wilbur Award; Mundo y Palabra/The World and the Word, a bilingual chapbook that is part of a series titled Walking to Windward: 21 New England Poets; a chapbook in the Pudding House invitational series, titled Rhina P. Espaillat: Greatest Hits, 1942 - 2001; The Shadow I Dress In, winner of the 2003 Stanzas Prize; a chapbook titled The Story-teller's Hour; Playing at Stillness; a bilingual collection of poems and essays titled Agua de dos rios, published under the auspieces of the Dominican Republic's Ministry of Culture; a bilingual collection of short stories titled El olor de la memoria/The Scent of Memory; and a poetry collection titled Her Place in These Designs.

Her additional awards include the Sparrow Sonnet Prize; three yearly prizes from the Poetry Society of America; the Der-Hovanessian Translation Prize, the Barbara Bradley Award and the May Sarton Award from the New England Poetry Club; the Oberon Prize; the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award sponsored by The Formalist (twice); the Tree at My Window Award from the Robert Frost Foundation (specifically for her Spanish translations of Robert Frost, and her English translations of Saint John of the Cross and the Dominican poet Cesar Sanchez Beras); the Dominican Republic's Salome Ureña de Henriquez Award for Service to Dominican Culture and Education; a recognition award from the Dominican Studies Association and Division of Academic Affairs of Eugenio Maria de Hostos Community College, and another from the Commissioner of Dominican Cultural Affairs in the United States; an Award for services to Dominican letters, presented to her as one of the honorees at the Tenth International Book Fair held in Santo Domingo in 2007; and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Salem State College in 2008. She was also the honoree of the 2008 Newburyport Literary Festival, which in that year highlighted poetry and was titled "Mundo y Palabra/The World & The Word," to signal the festival's theme as the use of language to bridge distances in both space and time, across cultures and languages.

Espaillat is a founding member of the very active Fresh Meadows Poets in Queens, New York, as well as a founding member and former director of the Powow River Poets. She co-edited the FMP's first yearly anthology, and initiated the PRP's monthly reading series. She has been active with numerous cultural organizations in New York and Massachusetts, and been instrumental in bringing about bilingual poetry readings in the North of Boston area, and bilingual activities shared by the high school students of Lawrence and Newburyport.

Selected Bibliography:

Her Place in These Designs (Truman State University Press 2008)

El olor de la memoria/The Scent of Memory (CEDIBIL 2007)

Agua de dos rios (Editora Buho 2006)

Playing at Stillness (Truman State University Press 2005)

The Shadow I Dress In (David Robert Books 2004)

The Story-teller's Hour (Scienter Press 2004)

Rhina P. Espaillat: Greatest Hits, 1942 - 2001 (Pudding House Press 2003)

Rehearsing Absence (University of Evansville Press 2001)

Mundo y Palabra/The World and the Word (Oyster River Press 2001)

Where Horizons Go (Truman State University Press 1998)

Lapsing to Grace (Bennett & Kitchel 1992)