Rhina Polonia Espaillat is a bilingual Dominican-American poet and translator who has published eleven collections of poetry. She is known for writing poetry that captures the beauty of the mundane and the routine.
Life
Espaillat is of mixed Afro-Dominican, Spanish, French, and Arawak descent. She is the daughter of Carlos Manuel Homero Espaillat Brache and the grandniece and god-daughter of Dominican diplomat Rafael Brache. Through her great-uncle, Espaillat is a distant cousin 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 1937, Espaillat's father and great uncle, Rafael Brache, were Dominican diplomats stationed in Washington, D.C.. After dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered the Parsley Massacre of Haitians living along the Dominican border, Brache wrote a letter to Trujillo denouncing the massacre and, "saying he could no longer be associated with a government that had committed such a terrible criminal act." In response to the letter, the whole embassy staff were declared traitors and were exiled. Espaillat was temporarily left with her maternal grandmother in the Dominican Republic. In 1939, however, her parents felt more settled in the United States and Rhina joined them in Manhattan. She is a graduate of Hunter College where she got her Bachelor of Arts in 1953. In 1964 she completed her M.S.E. at Queens College. She taught English in the New York Citypublic 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 attended the first West Chester University Poetry Conference in 1995 and later recalled, "I was the only Hispanic there, but I realized that these people were open to everything, that their one interest was the craft. If you could bring something from another culture, they were open to it." Espaillat subsequently took charge of, "teaching the French Forms and the forms of repetition," but also made sure to teach classes in, "the Spanish and Hispanic examples of the forms" such as the décima and the ovillejo." Due to Espaillat's teaching and encouragement, the ovillejo, particularly, has become very popular among younger New Formalists writing in English. While being interviewed for a book about her life, Espaillat gleefully commented, "On the internet and in the stratosphere, everybody loves it." Espaillat writes poetry 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. Her work has been included in many popular anthologies, including The Heath Introduction to Poetry ; The Muse Strikes Back ; and In Other Words: Literature by Latinas of the U.S.. She is also known for her English translations of the Spanish language poems of St. John of the Cross, which have appeared in the American journal First Things. Her poetry contains rhythmic sonnets describing family life and domestic settings, called "snapshots" she also addresses issues of ancestry, assimilation, and immigration.
Personal life
Of her relationship with sculptor, teacher, and World War II veteran Alfred Moskowitz, Espaillat once said, "I met him at the wedding of my best friend, Mimi, and his best friend, Harry. I was still at Hunter College, in my junior year, and we ended up sitting at the same table at the wedding on Thanksgiving Day in 1951. And we started talking, then dancing, and - I know this sounds like madness - he proposed five weeks later on New Year's Eve, and we were married in June of 1952." They remained together until he died in 2016; the couple had three children.
