Dawn Lundy Martin

Dawn Lundy Martin is an American poet, performance artist, and scholar whose work stands at the radical intersection of conceptual poetics, Black feminist theory, and the phenomenology of the body. Martin grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, and has spoken about her upbringing in an environment shaped by racial violence and social precarity as a formative influence on her poetry’s urgent political consciousness. She holds a doctorate from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is a professor in the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh, where she co-directs the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics.

Martin is the author of several collections that have established her as one of the most formally daring and intellectually uncompromising poets of her generation. Discipline (2011) and Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life (2014) — the latter published by Nightboat Books and winner of the Lambda Literary Award — are marked by their fragmented syntax, their refusal of lyric consolation, and their insistence on making legible the experience of Black queer embodiment under conditions of violence and surveillance. Good Stock Strange Blood (2017) extended her formal experiments, drawing on performance art traditions to question the very capacity of language to bear witness to trauma. Her work has been associated with the Language poets and with conceptual writing more broadly, though Martin insists on the irreducibility of race and the body in ways that distinguish her practice from many of her peers.

Beyond her poetry, Martin has been a significant activist and community organizer. She is a founding member of the Black Took Collective, a group of Black avant-garde poets committed to collective practice and political action. Her essays and critical writings on race, poetics, and performance have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and she has lectured and performed widely at universities, museums, and arts venues.

Martin’s work demands and rewards the most attentive kind of reading. It is poetry that refuses easy consumption, that insists on the reader’s complicity, and that takes seriously the ethical stakes of aesthetic form. She is one of the most important poets working in America today, and her influence on a generation of poets thinking about race, queerness, and the avant-garde is profound and continuing.