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Martha Collins was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1940. She earned a Bachelor of Arts at Stanford University as well as a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. She founded the Creative Writing Program at The University of Massachusetts-Boston. Collins is currently Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College and lives in Oberlin, Ohio and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Collins is the author of four books of poetry: The Catastrophe of Rainbows (1985), The Arrangement of Space (1991), History of a Small Life on a Windy Planet (1993), and Some Things Words Can Do (1998). The Arrangement of Space was the winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Competition. Other noteworthy jobs include her work co-translating two volumes of poetry from the Vietnamese and her work editing a collection of essays on the poet Louise Bogan. She has also published a chapbook, Gone So Far (2005).
Her awards include:
- fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Institute, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Witter Bynner Foundation
- the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award
- three Pushcart Prizes
- a Lannan Residency grant
Most recently, Collins published a book-length poem, Blue Front. In Blue Front, Collins describes a lynching that her father witnessed in Cairo, Illinois when he was five years old.