Martha Collins (poet)

She has also co-edited, with Kevin Prufer and Martin Rock, a volume of poems by Catherine Breese Davis, accompanied by essays and an interview about the poet’s life and work.

In 1993 Collins began teaching in the summer workshop of the William Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences where she met several writers from Vietnam, including poet Nguyen Quang Thieu.

Known in her first few books for somewhat formal lyrical poems that occasionally referenced larger issues such as homelessness and war, Collins learned from an exhibit of lynching postcards in 2000 that the hanging her father said he had witnessed as a child was actually a lynching of an African American man, attended by 10,000 people in Cairo, Illinois.

In 2005 Collins published Blue Front, a book-length poem that involved research and focused on the event, and in 2012 she explored issues of race from both personal and historical perspectives in White Papers.

[6] Cynthia Hogue has described Collins as “a dazzling poet whose poetry is poised at the juncture between the lyric and ethics [and who] has addressed some of the most traumatic social issues of the twentieth century .