The Writer’s Block: A Video Q&A with Dawn Lundy Martin

Dawn Lundy Martin is interested in the ways that language is a time traveller- how it lives in the past and present, and how it can be used to create a future to live within.

She is the author of three award winning books of poetry; A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering (2007) earned her the Cave Canem Prize, DISCIPLINE (2011) was a Nightboat Books Poetry Prize recipient and finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, and Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (2014) won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry.

She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh. In 2016, she co-founded the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, where she currently serves as co-director.

Martin was faculty for the 2017 Cave Canem Writer’s Retreat, which culminated in a reading at City of Asylum, Pittsburgh. In preparation for her forthcoming collection, Good Stock, Strange Blood (August, 2017), she spoke with Sampsonia Way about the voices in her writing, the navigation of identity, and the material and imaginative work she believes that language can do.

Full transcript of the interview can be found here.