Abelardo "Lalo" Delgado, who taught Chicano studies at Metro State for 17 years, has posthumously received the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Lifetime Achievement Award from the city of Denver.

The award was presented at a ceremony Jan. 11 at the Boettcher Concert Hall in the Denver Performing Arts Complex, during which seven other Coloradans accepted MLK Humanitarian Awards for "their commitment to helping others and their diverse efforts to promote equal opportunity, unity and justice." The ceremony was followed by a free performance by the Colorado Symphony Orchestra in honor of Dr. King and the award recipients.

Delgado, who died in July at the age of 73, was an internationally recognized writer, probably most known for his poem "Stupid America," which was published in 1969 and is highly regarded still. He was also an activist whose lifelong work was to improve the plight of farm workers, prisoners and the barrio poor. Delgado was posthumously declared Denver's first poet laureate by Mayor John Hickenlooper last year.