Martha Collins is the author of four previous poetry collections, including Some Things Words Can Do, and co-translator of two volumes of poetry from the Vietnamese. She teaches at Oberlin College and lives in Oberlin, Ohio, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

About Blue Front:

"Reading this clear-eyed, sorrowing, searching poem of witness, I feel gooseflesh, and I weep, for fear and for the truth of our U.S. racism, which goes on and goes on. I admire everything Martha Collins has written, and I feel she was born to write this book. I want to quietly thank her, and to quietly thank those to whose memory she dedicates this great work."
—Jean Valentine

"Blue Front is an essential book for anyone interested in the history of race and racism in the United States. Martha Collins, a poet of unfailing intelligence and linguistic gifts, has created an original collage that conveys the texture and complexity of the events surrounding a lynching in 1909. Most importantly, the book’s force accrues and moves beyond that moment; it speaks to the most urgent conflicts of our own day—and days to come. What a fiercely uncompromising writer she is! Her poetry is brave and necessary."
—Alice Fulton