CAAPP’s Martin wins Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award

Dawn Lundy Martin, director and co-founder of Pitt’s Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, has won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, which comes with a $100,000 prize.

Established in 1992 at Claremont Graduate University in California by Kate Tufts in memory of her husband Kingsley, the award is given annually in recognition of the work of a mid-career poet.

Martin was honored for her creation of "an uncompromising poetics of resistance and exactitude," for her collection "Good Stock Strange Blood" (Coffee House Press).

The judging committee praised Martin's experimentation with language in "Good Stock Strange Blood" 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, who is the author of four books of poetry, is the 27th poet to be honored with the award, whose past winners include B.H. Fairchild, Angie Estes, Henri Cole, Thomas Lux, Linda Gregerson, D.A. Powell, Ross Gay, Patricia Smith, and judging committee chair Timothy Donnelly (who received the award in 2012 for "The Cloud Corporation").