Rhina Espaillat

Rhina Apolonia Espaillat Batista (born January 20, 1932, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) is a bilingual Dominican-American poet and translator who has published eleven collections of poetry.

Espaillat is the daughter of Carlos Manuel Homero Espaillat Brache (a nephew of Dominican diplomat Rafael Brache, who was the maternal grandfather of Democratic Party chairman Tom Perez), a Dominican diplomatic attaché, and Dulce María Batista. Her aunt Rhina Espaillat Brache founded the first ballet institute of La Vega. Espaillat is fourth-cousin once-removed of Adriano Espaillat and great-great-great-grand-niece of Dominican President Ulises Espaillat, and is descended from the French immigrant François Espeillac.

In 1939 the family was exiled and emigrated to the United States. She is a graduate of Hunter College where she got a B.A. in 1953. In 1964 she completed her M.S.E. at Queens College. She taught English in the New York City public schools for many years, and retired to Newburyport, Massachusetts, where for more than a decade she has led a group of New Formalist poets known as the Powow River Poets.

Espaillat writes in both English and Spanish, and has translated the poetry of Robert Frost and Richard Wilbur into Spanish. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The American Scholar, and many other journals. She is a two-time winner of the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, and she judged the 2012 Contest. Her second poetry collection, Where Horizons Go, was published by Truman State University Press in conjunction with her selection for the 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize. Her 2001 collection, Rehearsing Absence, was published by University of Evansville Press after winning the Richard Wilbur Award.

...
Wikipedia