About the Poem On April 19, 2021, Mario González died after being restrained by Alameda, California police. González was intoxicated, yet unarmed and nonthreatening; officers pinned him face down for approximately five minutes, weight on his back, till he became unresponsive. This police homicide occurred on the same day deliberations began in the Derek Chauvin trial. Lawyers for the family have now filed a wrongful death claim against the city of Alameda. A friend connected to the case contributed first-hand knowledge to the poem. The poem is also based on review of the police body cam video. González left behind a young son and an autistic brother.

About the Author Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His latest book of poems is called Floaters, winner of the 2021 National Book Award and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Other books of poems include Vivas to Those Who Have Failed(2016), The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006) and Alabanza (2003). He is the editor of What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (2019). He has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, a Letras Boricuas Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The title poem of his collection Alabanza, about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed. His book of essays and poems, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican- American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona. A former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. http://www.martinespada.net/