Dawn Lundy Martin

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Dawn Lundy Martin earned a BA from the University of Connecticut, an MA in creative writing from San Francisco State University, and a PhD in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Lundy Martin’s first full-length collection, A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering (University of Georgia Press, 2007), was selected by Carl Phillips for the 2007 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She is also the author of Good Stock Strange Blood (Coffee House Press, 2017), winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Award; Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books, 2014); and Discipline (Nightboat Books, 2011), which was selected by Fanny Howe for the 2009 Nightboat Books Poetry Prize.

In 2004, Lundy Martin coedited, alongside Vivien Labaton, The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism (Anchor Books, 2004), a collection of essays on modern theories of activism in America. She also wrote the afterword, titled “What, Then, is Freedom,” for Signet Classics’s publication of Harriet Ann Jacobs’s nineteenth-century slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (2010).

Lundy Martin is the cofounder of the Third Wave Foundation in New York, a national grant-making organization led by young women and transgender youth, which focuses on social justice activism. She is also a member of the Black Took Collective, a group of experimental Black poets embracing critical theory about gender, race, and sexuality.

Lundy Martin has been the recipient of two poetry grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and was awarded the 2008 Academy of American Arts and Sciences May Sarton Prize for Poetry.

Lundy Martin has taught at Montclair State University, The New School, and the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College. In February 2018, Martin served as the Poem-a-Day Guest Editor. The recipient of a United States Artists fellowship, she is currently the Toi Derricotte Chair in English and the director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) at the University of Pittsburgh.