Rhina Espaillat

In a January 2021 interview, Espaillat praised senior members of the Republican Party for having urged Donald Trump in vain to concede the 2020 Presidential Election, "I am very sorry for the mistakes he has made because I am not a one-party person. I don't believe that any democracy can survive with one party alone. We need something to argue over because that is the way that we arrive at the right way to do things."

Following the 2020 Presidential Election, President-Elect of the United States Joe Biden received a petition signed by more than 70 poets from Massachusetts to California, who urged him to select Espaillat to read her poetry at Biden's Presidential Inauguration.

In a 2017 interview, Espaillat recalled, "I think that as an immigrant, you create a family, and in New York, it’s interesting to do that. Everybody’s there. I was surrounded by Jewish kids in the school, and Italian kids, and Germans, and even Japanese who were having a rough time at that point, because the war was starting. So I ran into people who were, as my father said, just like us. They’re running from somebody. My father was a political exile. He explained that Jewish people were running from Europe because there were bad things happening. And I said, 'You mean they’re like us?' He said, 'Yes. The world is full of people like us, because the world is full of people just like Rafael Trujillo.'"

In a 2017 interview, Espaillat commented, "I think that outside the fabric that we belong in, that we’re part of, we really don’t mean very much. As a matter of fact, now that I lost my husband last February, I’m having a hard time feeling like a whole person, because it had been sixty-three years of a really good, happy marriage, and once you’ve had that kind of thing, you feel: 'Where’s the rest of me? He’s gone, suddenly there’s nobody on the other pillow.' I don’t think that feminism consists in thinking of yourself as nobody’s anything. I think it consists in precisely being somebody’s something and counting. Whatever doors you open for yourself are fine, but I think what really matters is whatever doors you succeed in opening for other people. Whatever good you do in the world makes you a person. I don’t think that existing for yourself alone is all that valuable. So maybe I’m a backward person. I guess I’m an unfeminist in that sense, but I don’t care."

In a 2017 interview, Espaillat sharply criticized sitting U.S. President Donald Trump on the one hand, and the excesses of both identity politics and Intersectionality on the other, for causing the political polarization of the American people. Espaillat commented, "There are a lot of rights to defend that other people have not yet been given, that are their rights by nature. And I think that if we isolate ourselves into little groups fighting for mine, and for yours, and for yours and for yours, we’re not going to make it. I think we need to become a whole tapestry of people who are fighting for all rights, including the rights for White working class people who are being underpaid and overworked and who have not been taught what they should have been taught. I don’t think we can afford to throw rocks at anybody, even the people who look like the enemy right now, because they’re not the enemy. They’re just … other people."

They remained together until Moskowitz died in February 2016; the couple had three sons.

Decades later, the book remains one of Espaillat's most cherished possessions. In a June 2014 email to her biographers, Espaillat described the volume as, "bandaged with tape but miraculously still in one piece and still at work, like a brave old veteran."

Since her return to American poetry, Espaillat's 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 she won the Richard Wilbur Award.

Espaillat attended the first West Chester University Poetry Conference, which was founded by New Formalist poets Michael Peich and Dana Gioia, 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."

Along with her husband, Espaillat taught English in the New York City public school system, including Jamaica High School in Queens, for many years. In 1990, she chose early retirement and moved with her husband to Newburyport, Massachusetts, to be closer to their two sons and their grandchildren.Their foster son, who had joined the family in 1968, remained in New York City with his wife and stepchildren. Espaillat later recalled that she had enjoyed teaching, but missed poetry deeply. For this reason, her husband had told her, "Why don't you choose early retirement and give more time to what you really love?" In Newburyport, Espaillat began writing poetry almost immediately and has since led the Powow River Poets, the local chapter of the Massachusetts State Poetry Society, which has become a New Formalist chapter due to Espaillat's leadership and influence.

In 1964, Espaillat completed her M.S.E. at Queens College.

Following the CIA-backed assassination of Rafael Trujillo on May 20, 1961, and U.S. President John F. Kennedy's use of coercive diplomacy to effect regime change in the Dominican Republic on November 19, 1961, Espaillat's relatives at last felt able to safely travel to the United States and visit Espaillat, her husband, and their two sons in Flushing, Queens. Espaillat's visiting cousins charmed her many local friends and neighbors, as she later described in the poem Translation.

Also following Trujillo's assassination, Espaillat's great-uncle, Rafael Brache, his wife, and several of their sons returned permanently to the Dominican Republic. Espaillat's parents, though, did not. Espaillat later recalled, "I was married with children and my parents didn't want to leave us. They'd also made many close friends in the United States; and, of course, many of the people back home had already died, including both of my grandmothers. I believe that it's very common in immigrant communities to have powerful longings for home, but by 1961, my parents' lives were centered in the U.S."

After majoring in English and minoring in Latin and the Humanities, Espaillat graduated from Hunter College with her Bachelor of Arts in 1953. Following her 1952 interracial marriage to Alfred Moskowitz, however, Espaillat drifted for a long time out of contact with the Poetry Society of America while working as a public school teacher and raising her TWO sons in Flushing, Queens. During her long absence from American poetry, Espaillat relied heavily upon the mentorship and encouragement of Alfred Dorn, who would go on to become one of the founders of New Formalism.

Of her interracial marriage to 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." At the time of their wedding, Rhina Espaillat was only 21-years old.

Following her November 1947 debut, Espaillat's poetry regularly appeared in The Ladies' Home Journal and, eventually, in a British magazine as well. The resulting exposure caused her to receive a large number of fan letters.

The son of Romanian Jewish immigrants with left-wing views, Moskowitz was an industrial arts teacher, labor union organizer, and sculptor. He had grown up in The Bronx while speaking Yiddish in the home and had fought as a 19-year-old GI during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. According to Esaillat's biographers Nancy Kang and Silvio Torres-Saillant, "Moskowitz brought to the household a sense of stark realism as experienced by U.S. military personnel during World War II. This was a time when many young Americans took to the front with a profound desire to fight for freedom and justice against regimes that endorsed tyranny and oppression."

While attending elementary school at P.S. 94, Espaillat would often visit the public library next door during her lunch break. During a, "guided trespass", into the adult section of the library, an enthusiastic Espaillat came upon a copy of the 1942 poetry anthology, A Treasury of Great Poems English and American, in which Louis Untermeyer collected the literary canon of poetry in English from the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain to the interwar period of the 20th century. When Rhina asked her parents to buy her a copy, the Espaillats were, "delighted by their daughter's passion for a compilation of poems rather than dolls or dresses", but they could not afford the book's asking price of $3.75, which was a sizeable amount of money for a refugee family in 1943. In response, Don Homero Espaillat Brache asked for help from his daughter's godfather, Rafael Brache, who bought a copy of the book as a 1943 Christmas gift for his god-daughter.

In 1939, however, Espaillat's parents felt more settled in the United States and Rhina joined them in a New York City apartment on West Forty-Ninth Street in Hell's Kitchen.

In 1937, a five-year old Espaillat accompanied her parent on a diplomatic mission to Washington, D.C.. At the time, Espaillat's great-uncle and god-father, Rafael Brache, headed the Dominican delegation and Espaillat's father was the legation's secretary.

In 1937, however, Trujillo issued orders to the Dominican Army that resulted in the genocidal Parsley massacre of an estimated 20,000 Haitians in the Dominican Republic. In response, a horrified Rafael Brache wrote a letter to Trujillo which denounced the massacre and said, "he could no longer be associated with a government that had committed such a terrible criminal act."

According to Espaillat, "we did learn that the dictator was absolutely furious when he received it." At that time, however, there was little or no organized opposition to Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and, in November 1937, a majority vote by the National Congress declared Rafael Brache and three other critics of the massacre to be, "unworthy Dominicans", and, "enemies of the fatherland". According to Espaillat's biographer Leslie Monsour, Brache and his nephew, Espaillat's father, knew that they, "would face a dire punishment – at best imprisonment – and the lives of other members of the family would be endangered if the two men returned to their country." By that time, however, "reports of Trujillo's oppression and brutality had reached international notoriety", and the United States Federal Government willingly granted political asylum to Rafael Brache, his nephew, and their dependents. Both men and their families resettled in New York City.

Rhina Polonia Espaillat (born January 20, 1932, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) is a bilingual Dominican-American poet and translator who is affiliated with the literary movement known as New Formalism in American poetry. She has published eleven collections of poetry. Her work has been included in many popular anthologies, including The Heath Introduction to Poetry (Heath 2000); The Muse Strikes Back (Story Line Press 1997); and In Other Words: Literature by Latinas of the U.S. (Arte Publico Press 1994).

Rhina Espaillat was born in the Dominican Republic's capital of Santo Domingo, which Caudillo Rafael Trujillo had recently renamed Cuidad Trujillo, on January 20, 1932. Shortly after her birth, Espaillat's parents returned with their infant daughter to their hometown of La Vega, which had been founded by Christopher Columbus in 1494.

Rafael Brache had supported the 1930 coup d'etat that had brought Rafael Trujillo to power. Furthermore, Brache's duties ever since becoming Ambassador to the United States in 1934 had mainly involved defending Trujillo's public reputation, which was suffering due to reports of political assassinations, human rights abuses, and the censorship of the press.

Espaillat is also known for her literary translations of the Christian poetry of St. John of the Cross (1542–1591) from Castilian Spanish into American English and which appeared in the literary journal First Things, and of similarly translating the greatest works from the literary canon of both Spanish and Latin American poetry. Espaillat has also produced acclaimed translations from American English into Spanish of the poems of both Robert Frost and Richard Wilbur.