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Martha Collins is the author of Blue Front, a book-length poem based on a lynching her father witnessed when he was five years old. Blue Front won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and was chosen as one of "25 Books to Remember from 2006" by the New York Public Library.
Collins' chapbook Sheer (Barnwood, 2008) is her most recent publication.
She has also published four collections of poems, two books of co-translations from the Vietnamese, and an earlier chapbook of poems.
Her other awards include fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Witter Bynner Foundation, as well as three Pushcart Prizes, the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, and a Lannan residency grant.
A selection of poems from Blue Front won the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize in 2005; other selections from the book appeared in Kenyon Review and Ploughshares.
Collins founded the Creative Writing Program at UMass-Boston, and for ten years was Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. She is currently editor-at-large for FIELD magazine and one of the editors of the Oberlin College Press.
Recently published
Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006)
Martha Collins' father, as a five-year-old boy, sold fruit in front of the Blue Front Restaurant in Cairo, Illinois, in November 1909. The lynching he witnessed there is the subject of Blue Front, Collins' fifth book of poetry.
Sheer (Barnwood, 2008)
Sheer is a chapbook of poems that explore the convergence of personal loss and global violence, ending with an earth embracing vision in which "words are golden light, on the dark of the water."
Hear Collins read an excerpt from Sheer, "From The Sky," for NPR's Weekend Edition.