Martha Collins founded the Creative Writing Program at The University of Massachusetts-Boston. She is the author of six books of poetry and two chapbooks.  Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ainsfield Wolf Award, the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award , three Pushcart Prizes and a Lannan Residency grant . Collins published an award-winning, book-length poem, Blue Front, where she describes a lynching that her father witnessed in Cairo, Illinois when he was five years old.  Her new book, White Papers, is a series of untitled poems that explore race from a variety of personal, historical, and cultural perspectives. Collins is currently Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College and lives in Oberlin, Ohio and Cambridge, Massachusetts.