Dawn's Affiliations: CAAPP
Dawn Lundy Martin is an American poet and essayist. She is the author of four books of poems: Good Stock Strange Blood, winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry; Life in a Box is a Pretty Life, which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; DISCIPLINE, A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering, and three limited edition chapbooks. Her nonfiction can be found in n+1, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, boundary2, The Believer, The Chicago Review, and Best American Essays 2019 and 2021. Martin is the Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair of English in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh; she is also Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics.
Martin’s current creative-scholarly work operates at the intersecting fields of experimental poetics, video installation, and performance. Letters to the Future: BLACK WOMEN / Radical WRITING, co-edited with Erica Hunt, was published in 2018 by Kore Press. Her video installation work has been featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. Martin has also written a libretto for a video installation opera, titled “Good Stock on the Dimension Floor,” featured in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. She is the recipient of a 2016 Investing in Professional Artists Grant from the Pittsburgh Foundation and the Heinz Endowments, a 2016 poetry grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a 2018 NEA grant in nonfiction, and a 2022 United States Artist Fellowship. With Ronaldo V. Wilson and Duriel E. Harris, she is also a co-founder of the Black Took Collective, an experimental performance art/poetry group of three.
Martin is at work on two concurrent projects: a book of poems titled The Laceration, which will be published by Nightboat Books in 2024, and an essayistic memoir titled When a Person Goes Missing, forthcoming from Pantheon Books.