Dawn Lundy Martin won the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award

Dawn Lundy Martin is the recipient of the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for 2019.

Martin is a professor in the Writing Program in the Department of English and director and co-founder of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, all in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences.

The award is “given annually in recognition of the work of a mid-career poet,” and comes with a cash prize of $100,000.

Martin is recognized for her collection “Good Stock Strange Blood,” most particularly for her “experimentation with language … for creating ‘fascinating, mysterious, formidable, and sublime’ explorations of the meaning of identity, the body and the burdens of history along with one’s own private traumas.”

Martin will be honored at a private ceremony in April in San Marino, California.

Photography by Nicole Callahan