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The Bread and Roses Hall of Fame award is given annually to the individual or institution who has made a noteworthy contribution to the history of the 1912 Bread and Roses Strike of Lawrence, Massachusetts, and its legacy for the present and the future.

It recognizes distinguished contributions from social justice and union activists who contribute to the well-being of today’s workers and immigrants of Lawrence and New England.

The award created by Hartley Pleshaw was first presented in 2006 to Carmela Teoli and accepted by her daughter, Josie Catalano.

HALL OF FAME AWARD

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2022 HALL OF FAME AWARD WINNER

Isabel Melendez

 

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His new book of poems from Norton is called Floaters. 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 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, and reissued by Northwestern. A former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. 

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PAST AWARD WINNERS

2021

Martín Espada

2019

Katherine Paterson

 

2017

Bruce Watson

 

2016

Dexter Arnold

 

2015

Phyllis Tyler

 

2014

Robert Forrant

 

2013

Ignatius R.J. Piscitello

 

2012

Chett Briggs and Karen Lane

 

2011

Eartha Dengler

 

2010

Ralph Fasanella

 

2009

Angelo Rocco

 

2008

John Ramie

 

2007

Paul Cowan

 

2006

Carmela Teoli

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