Martha Collins

Martha Collins is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Casualty Reports (Pittsburgh, 2022) and Because What Else Could I Do (Pittsburgh, 2019), which won the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Other recent books are Night Unto Night (Milkweed, 2018), Admit One: An American Scrapbook (Pittsburgh, 2016), Day Unto Day (Milkweed, 2014), White Papers (Pittsburgh, 2012) and the book-length poem Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006), which won an Anisfield-Wolf Award and was chosen as one of “25 Books to Remember” by the New York Public Library. Her other awards include fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, the Witter Bynner Foundation, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation, as well as three Pushcart Prizes and a Lannan Foundation residency fellowship.

Collins has also published four co-translations of Vietnamese poetry, most recently Black Stars by Ngo Tu Lap (Milkweed, 2013), and co-edited Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries (Graywolf, 2017, with Kevin Prufer); Catherine Breese Davis: On the Life & Work of an American Master (Unsung Masters, 2015, with Kevin Prufer & Martin Rock); and Wendy Battin: On the Life & Work of an American Master (Unsung Masters, with Charles Hartman, Pamela Alexander, and Matthew Krajniak, 2020).

Founder of the creative writing program at UMass-Boston, Collins was Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College for ten years.