Dawn Lundy Martin

Dawn Lundy Martin  is an American poet, essayist, and memoirist. She 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 Instructions for the Lovers (2024), a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; Good Stock Strange Blood (2017), winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (2015), which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; 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.

Her nonfiction can be found in n+1, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Chicago Review, and several iterations of the annual Best American Essays.

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 was a 2022 United States Artist Fellow, the inaugural Toi Derricotte endowed chair in English at the University of Pittsburgh, and the founding director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. Currently, she is professor and distinguished writer in residence at Bard College.