Dawn Lundy Martin

Poet and activist Dawn Lundy Martin earned a BA at the University of Connecticut, an MA at San Francisco State University, and a PhD at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Her poetry collections include Discipline (2011), chosen by Fanny Howe for the Nightboat Books Prize, and A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering (2007), which was selected for the Cave Canem Poetry Prize by Carl Phillips and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. She is also the author of Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books, 2015) and Good Stock, Strange Blood (Coffee House Press, 2017). Precise, tender, and unflinching, Martin’s work is at once innovative and emotionally fraught. Fanny Howe described the poems in Discipline as “dense and deep. They are necessary, and hot on the eye.”

With Vivien Labaton, Martin coedited The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism (2004). She also cofounded both the Third Wave Foundation and the post-theorist Black Took Collective. She has received the Academy of American Arts and Science’s May Sarton Prize for Poetry as well as grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Martin has taught at the University of Pittsburgh, The New School, and Bard College.