Growing the Poem with Martha Collins (via Zoom)

During the first hour of this four-hour workshop we’ll read and explore published poems that will give you strategies for developing fragments and stalled beginnings into actual poems, for writing longer and more complex poems, and for moving your work into more exciting aesthetic and emotional territory. The last three hours of the workshop will be spent in careful discussion of your own poems. Please e-mail a copy of a one-page poem that you’re not yet satisfied with to martha.collins@oberlin.edu by noon on Thursday, Oct 24, 2024.

NB: This class will be taught on Zoom (Saturday, October 26, 12:30-4:30 PM ET) and will be capped at 12 students. Registrants will receive the Zoom link to the email address they use to register. It will arrive immediately after registration so please check your spam folder if you do not receive it. It will also be sent the day before class as a reminder. Please review the course policies page before registering for any classes. Please email misty@writerscenter.org with any questions.

All HVWC scholarship applications will be available on May 1 and will be due on May 15 for all summer/fall 2024 classes.

Martha Collins’ eleventh book of poetry, Casualty Reports, was published in the Pitt Poetry Series in October 2022. Her tenth book, Because What Else Could I Do (Pittsburgh, 2019), won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. Her previous poetry books include two volumes of linked sequences, Night Unto Night and Day Unto Day (Milkweed, 2018 & 2014), and three works that focus on race and racism: Admit One: An American Scrapbook (Pittsburgh, 2016), White Papers (Pittsburgh, 2012), and Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006).

Blue Front, a book-length poem based on a lynching the poet’s father witnessed as a child, won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was chosen as one of “25 Books to Remember from 2006” by the New York Public Library; both Blue Front and White Papers won Ohioana awards. Collins’ other awards include fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Witter Bynner Foundation, as well as three Pushcart Prizes, the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize, and residency grants from the Lannan Foundation, the Siena Art Institute, the Santa Fe Art Institute, and the Women’s International Study Center.

An active translator, Collins has also published four volumes of co-translations from the Vietnamese and co-edited, with Kevin Prufer, Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries (Graywolf, 2017). Her fifth co-translated volume, Dreaming the Mountain: Poems by Tue Sy, with Nyugen Ba Chung, was published by Milkweed in spring 2023.

Collins has also co-edited other anthologies, including two volumes in the Unsung Masters Series, on Wendy Battin (2020) and Catherine Breese Davis (2015), and a volume of essays on the poet Jane Cooper (Michigan, 2019, with Celia Bland).

Born in Nebraska and raised in Iowa, Collins was educated at Stanford University and the University of Iowa. She founded the Creative Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, and for ten years served as Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. She served as Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell University in 2010, and currently teaches (and is available for) short-term workshops. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.