Martha Collins has published ten books of poetry, most recently Because What Else Could I Do (2019). Her previous volumes include Admit One: An American Scrapbook (2016), White Papers (2012), and the book-length poem Blue Front (2006), as well as the paired volumes Night Unto Night and Day Unto Day (2018, 2014). Collins has also published four volumes of co-translated Vietnamese poetry and edited several anthologies, including, with Kevin Prufer, Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries (2017).
Collins has won numerous awards for her work, including an Anisfield-Wolf Award, three Pushcart prizes, and fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, and the Siena Art Institute. Founder of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts-Boston and Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College for ten years, she currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.