Dawn Lundy Martin
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 Instructions for the Lovers (Nightboat Books, 2024), which was short-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award; 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), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; 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 the United States.
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. She is also the recipient of the 2026 n+1 Writer’s Fellowship, a 2022 United States Artists Fellowship, and a Creative Writing Fellowship in Prose from the National Endowment for the Arts.
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 taught at Montclair State University, The New School, and the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College. In February 2018, she served as the Poem-a-Day Guest Editor. She was 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 (CAAPP). Currently, Lundy Martin is a professor and distinguished writer in residence at Bard College.