StARTers with Martha Collins

Visiting artist at the Siena Art Institute for the month of February, American poet Martha Collins will discuss her work, focusing partly on her two most recent books, and partly on work-in-progress. The two books are White Papers (Pitt Poetry Series, 2012), a series of untitled poems that explore race from a variety of personal, historical, and cultural perspectives, questioning what it means to be “white” in a multi-racial society, and Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006), a book-length poem based on a lynching her father witnessed when he was five years old.
The work-in-progress is a series of long poems Collins has been working on for some time, one of which she is writing during her residency at the Siena Art Institute. Six of these long poems will be published in a volume called Day Unto Day in 2014; she is now working on a second series of six, to be called Night Unto Night.
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' 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, a Lannan residency grant, and the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize.