May 16th – Martha Collins and Jennifer Franklin – in person

Martha Collins is the author of twelve books of poetry, most recently Like Her Body the World: Selected Early Poems (Unbound Edition, 2027), Casualty Reports (Pittsburgh, 2022), and Because What Else Could I Do (Pittsburgh, 2019), which won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. Numerous other awards include, most recently, the 2025 Golden Rose from the New England Poetry Club. Collins has also published five co-translated volumes of Vietnamese poetry, several co-edited anthologies, and Word Work: Essays, Reviews, Reflections (Tiger Bark, 2025). She founded the Creative Writing Program at UMass Boston and served as Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College for ten years. Her website is marthacollinspoet.com

Jennifer Franklin is a poet, professor, and editor. She is the author of four poetry collections including A Fire in Her Brain, chosen by Rowan Ricardo Phillips for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets (Princeton University Press, January 2027). The epistolary poems for Lucia Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath from A Fire in Her Brain have been published in American Poetry Review, The Bennington Review, Poetry Northwest, The Montreal International Poetry Anthology, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, Prairie Schooner, and The Pushcart Anthology. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and Café Royal Cultural Foundation, and residencies from Hawthornden Castle in Scotland and the T.S. Eliot House in Gloucester, MA. She teaches in Manhattanville’s MFA program, Poets House, The Frost Place, 92NY, Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center, and her own manuscript revision workshops. For more information, please visit jenniferfranklinpoet.com