An award-winning poet will be the guest speaker for Bluffton University’s annual English Festival, which has been moved to the fall this academic year.

In the English Festival Forum, at 11 a.m. Thursday, Nov. 13, in Founders Hall, Martín Espada will offer counsel on the discovery of poetry, the poet’s life and the role of the poet as a citizen in a democracy. His talk, titled “The Republic of Poetry,” is free and open to the public.

Espada’s 2006 book of the same name was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and recipient of the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement.

His more than 15 books also include “The Trouble Ball: Poems” (2011), which won an International Latino Book Award, among others; “Alabanza: New and Selected Poems: 1982-2002” (2003), an American Library Association Notable Book of the Year; and “Imagine the Angels of Bread” (1996), winner of an American Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

The Brooklyn, N.Y., native, currently a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, has also published two collections of essays, edited two anthologies and released a CD of poetry. Among his other honors are two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. He is a graduate of Northeastern University Law School and a former tenant lawyer in the Boston-area Latino community.