The Shadow I Dress In

by Rhina P. Espaillat

Rhina P. Espaillat's The Shadow I Dress In is the winner of the 2003 Stanzas Prize. Espaillat has emerged, late in her life, as a poet of sublime formal skill and an increasingly wide readership. She ranges widely in her tones, from colloquial to neoclassical, but always--seemingly without effort--finds the perfect balance between mind and music.

144 pages, Paperback

First published February 28, 2004

About the author

Rhina P. Espaillat (b. 1932) is a bilingual American poet and translator.

Espaillat was born in the Dominican Republic in 1932; in 1939, after Espaillat’s great-uncle opposed the regime under dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, the family was exiled and emigrated to the United States. She is a graduate of Hunter College. She taught high school English in the New York City public schools for many years, and retired to Newburyport, Massachusetts. She is a founding member of the Fresh Meadows Poets and a founding member and former director of the Powow River Poets.

Espaillat writes in both English and Spanish, and has become the most prominent translator of the poetry of Robert Frost into Spanish. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The American Scholar, and many other journals. Espaillat has published 11 poetry collections, including Lapsing to Grace: Poems and Drawings (1992); Where Horizons Go (1998), winner of the 1998 T.S. Eliot Prize; Rehearsing Absence (2001), recipient of the 2001 Richard Wilbur Award; Playing at Stillness (2005); and a bilingual chapbook titled Mundo Y Palabra/the World and the Word (2001).