In this talk, award-winning author Dawn Lundy Martin will read across poets from whom she's learned and how they have influenced the trajectory of her poetics. The talk will look closely at work by these poets and the sociopolitical contexts in which their languages, attentions, and formal experiments are produced. Free and open to the public. Public parking is available in the Woodside Garage beneath Langsam Library on the Uptown Campus, or along Martin Luther King Drive on the north edge of the Uptown campus.

Dawn Lundy Martin is an American poet and essayist. She is the author of five books of poems: Instructions for The Lovers; Good Stock Strange Blood, winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry; Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life, which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; 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. Martin was the first person to hold the Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair in English at the University of Pittsburgh, where she co-founded and directed the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. She is currently working on a memoir titled When a Person Goes Missing, forthcoming from Pantheon Books. She is Professor and Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.