Poet Martha Collins to read for The Writing Program Reading Series Feb. 1

Jan. 23, 2007 -- Poet Martha Collins will read from her work at 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 1, for The Writing Program Reading Series.

The reading is free and open to the public and is sponsored by The Writing Program in Arts & Sciences. It takes place in Hurst Lounge, located on the second floor of Duncker Hall, in the northeast corner of Brookings Quadrangle. For more information, call (314) 935-7130.

Collins is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Blue Front (2006). The book-length poem is based on a November 1909 lynching that was witnessed by her father, then a five-year-old boy who sold fruit in front of the Blue Front Restaurant in Cairo, IL.

Collins previous collections include Gone So Far (2005), Some Things Words Can Do (1998), A History of Small Life on a Windy Planet (1993), The Arrangement of Space (1991) and The Catastrophe of Rainbows (1985). In addition, she has edited a collection of essays on the poet Louise Bogan and co-translated two volumes from the Vietnamese, Green Rice (2005), poems by Lam Thi My Da; and The Women Carry River Water (1997), poems by Nguyen Quang Thieu.

Collins' awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Institute, the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the Witter Bynner Foundation, as well as three Pushcart Prizes, the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America and a Lannan Foundation residency grant.

Collins founded the Creative Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. Since 1997 has taught at Oberlin College, where she is Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing and one of the editors of FIELD magazine and Oberlin College Press.