Our poetry editor for November and December is Dawn Lundy Martin, who is an author of three books of poetry, and three chapbooks. Of her latest collection, Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books 2015), Fred Moten says, “Imagine Holiday singing a Blind alley, or Brooks pricing hardpack dandelion, and then we’re seized and thrown into the festival of detonation we hope we’ve been waiting for.” Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh, Martin is a member of the three-person performance group, The Black Took Collective. She is also a member of the global artist collective, HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?, the group that withdrew its work from the 2014 Whitney Biennial to protest the museum’s biased curatorial practices. Martin is currently working on a hybrid memoir, a tiny bit of which appears as the essay, “The Long Road to Angela Davis’s Library,” published in the December 2014 New Yorker magazine.

Type of work I am looking for:

I’m looking for work that reaches across boundaries, breaks rules, is necessary and urgent, says something the world needs to hear in ways that ring my ear and steal my breath. Make me breathless.

Submit poetry to Dawn here starting November 1.

Photo © Max Freeman.