Books by Dawn Lundy Martin

The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism

by Vivien Labaton, Dawn Lundy Martin

Young feminists today are becoming activists on behalf of many causes beyond the classic—and indispensable--feminist ones of reproductive rights and equal pay for equal work. In The Fire This Time, Dawn Martin, one of four founders of The Third Wave Foundation--a multiracial, multi-issue, and multicultural activist organization--and Vivien Labaton, its first executive director, offer an exciting cross section of feminist voices that express new directions in activism, identity, and thought. Ayana Bird dissects the role of black women in hip-hop; Joshua Breitbart and Ana Noguiera demonstrate how Indimedia can break the hold of the corporate media over the news; and Jennifer Bleyer reviews the exhilarating power unleashed by the GirlZine movement. Anna Kirkland’s analysis of transsexual and transgendered people and the law is deeply thoughtful, and Shireen Lee's piece on women, technology, and feminism envisions empowering prospects for women..

Ranging from media and culture to politics and globalization, The Fire This Time is a call to new frontiers of activism, and helps reinvent feminism for a new generation.

No Regrets: Three Discussions

by Elif Batuman, Dawn Lundy Martin, Emily Witt, Kristin Dombek, n+1, Emily Gould, Carla Blumenkranz, Sarah Resnick, Sara Marcus, Elizabeth Gumport, Amanda Katz, Namara Smith, Astra Taylor

A follow-up to n+1's 2007 pamphlet What We Should Have Known, No Regrets talks to twelve writers, editors, academics, and artists about life and reading in their early twenties.

Letters to the Future: Black Women/Radical Writing

by Dawn Lundy Martin, Erica Hunt

Poetry. African & African American Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Women's Studies. Art. Edited by Erica Hunt and Dawn Lundy Martin. A collection of poems, essays, elder conversations, and visual works, LETTERS TO THE FUTURE: BLACK WOMEN / RADICAL WRITING, celebrates temporal, spatial, formal, and linguistically innovative literature. The anthology collects late-modern and contemporary work by Black women from the United States, England, Canada, and the Caribbean--work that challenges readers to participate in meaning making. Because one contextual framework for the collection is "art as a form of epistemology," the writing in the anthology is the kind of work driven by the writer's desire to radically present, uncovering what she knows and does not know, as well as critically addressing the future.

Erica Hunt, in her introduction to the collection, says, "The future is a slippery project. What can it hold? We asked writers to write about it, imagining the future as the present conjugated--conjoining the past, the present with some other time...One dimension that drew our curiosity was to know how this particular group of Black women writers would respond to the question of tomorrow. The Black women in this edition were writers we'd known or been introduced to who had been insistent makers of poems and prose that set up radical encounters between language, person, community and the political. We discussed these letters as we received them, marveling at the range of strategies to refract, forecast or expand the penumbra of the present into the shifting and dim lit future."

In Dawn Lundy Martin's introduction, she says, "It has always been difficult for me to conceptualize what we call blackness in relation to human bodies, particularly myself as an indicator of the thing I don't quite understand. It's a strange predicament, and a worrying one...On the one hand, the claim of blackness need not be a claim. A black person in the world experiences themselves as black given the perception by others as to what black is. It is a (mis)recognition, always legible, often very slight in the adjustment of the face, a minor tick, a momentary widening of the eyes, almost imperceptible in its speechless announcement, 'a black is in the room.'"

List of contributors includes Betsy Fagin, Ruth Ellen Kocher, Robin Coste Lewis, Lillian Yvonne Bertram, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, r. erica doyle, Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, Duriel E. Harris, Harryette Mullen, giovanni singleton, Evie Shockley, Khadijah Queen, Wendy S. Walters, Adrian Piper, Yona Harvey, Harmony Holiday, Tracie Morris, Claudia Rankine, Deborah Richards, Metta Sáma, Kara Walker, Renee Gladman, Tonya Foster, Julie Patton, Akilah Oliver, Simone White, M. NourbeSe Philip, Lucille Clifton and Sonia Sanchez in conversation, Wanda Coleman interview, Jayne Cortez and Sekou Siundiata with Tracie Morris, Erica Hunt, Dawn Lundy Martin, and Tisa Bryant.

Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life

by Dawn Lundy Martin

Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life continues leading American poet Dawn Lundy Martin's investigation into what is produced in the interstices between the body, experience, and language, and how alternative narratives can yield some other knowledge about what it means to be black & queer in contemporary America.

A Gathering of Matter, a Matter of Gathering Poems

by Dawn Lundy Martin

Dawn Lundy Martin’s work is neither language poetry, which rejects the speaking subject, nor strictly lyric, which embraces the speaking “I.” It might best be described as poetry where, in the words of Juliana Spahr, “the lyric meets language”--both an investigation into the opacity of language and the expression of a passionate speaker who struggles to speak meaningfully.

Martin’s poems bend the form into something new, seeking a way to approach the horrific and its effect on the psyche more fully than might be possible in the worn groove of the traditional lyric. Her formal inventiveness is balanced by a firm grounding in bodily experience and in the amazing capacity of language to expand itself in Martin’s hands. She explodes any pretense at a world where words mean exactly what we want them to mean and never more nor less.

The poems are neither gentle nor easy, but they make a powerful case that neither gentleness nor easiness is appropriate in the attempt to contend with the trauma and violence that are an inescapable part of human history and human experience. Martin’s book acknowledges the difficulty but not the impossibility of utterance in trauma’s wake, and it ventures into the unimaginable at many levels, from the personal to the cultural.

Good Stock Strange Blood (Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award)

by Dawn Lundy Martin

From Good Stock Strange Blood:

And, yet, each morning a fireheart grief in the body coming out of sleep. The listening to the smoke as if fills and weeps inside the chest, choking strength out hands weighted, dangling. We wonder where else it lives before it fills the body up. We assume it comes inside through the hole that promises invasion.
Lundy Martin is author of A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering and DISCIPLINE, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award.