About Rhina Espaillat

Rhina P. Espaillat was born in the Dominican Republic in 1932. She has lived in the United States since 1939 and taught high school English in New York City for several years. Espaillat writes poetry and prose both in English and in her native Spanish. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines, including The Lyric, Poetry, Sparrow, Orbis, The Formalist, and The American Scholar, as well as some forty anthologies. Espaillat has eight poetry collections in print, including Where Horizons Go, which won the 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize; Rehearsing Absence, which won the 2001 Richard Wilbur Award; and most recently, Playing at Stillness. In 2004 she became the first winner of the Tree at My Window Award from the Robert Frost Foundation for her Spanish translations of Robert Frost and her English translations of Saint John of the Cross and César Sánchez Beras. That same year she also received the Dominican Republic's Salome Ureña de Henríquez Award for service to Dominican culture and education.

Espaillat lives in Newburyport, MA, with her husband Alfred Moskowitz, a sculptor. For 14 years, she coordinated the Newburyport Art Association's Annual Poetry Contest, is on the planning committee of the Newburyport Literary Festival, and is a founding member and former director of the Powow River Poets. She has also been instrumental in bringing about bilingual poetry readings in the area north of Boston, and has assisted teachers Debbie Szabo and César Sánchez Beras with the planning for bilingual activities shared by high school students of Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Newburyport.