Dawn Lundy Martin is an American poet and essayist. She is the author of four books of poems: Good Stock Strange Blood, winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry; Life in a Box is a Pretty Life; DISCIPLINE; A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering; and three limited-edition chapbooks. Her nonfiction can be found in n+1, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Believer, and Best American Essays 2019 and 2021. In her academic life, Dawn is the Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair in English at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. At MacDowell she worked on a new collection of poems titled The Laceration and a memoir titled When a Person Goes Missing (forthcoming from Pantheon Books). The memoir is a family story that exemplifies how the American narrative of rare Black exceptionalism is a means of repressing generations of Black people.
Portrait by Erika Hodges and Max Freeman
