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

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