Longfellow Summer Arts Festival with Martha Collins

For the final 2025 event in the NEPC’s We (too) The People series at the Longfellow House, we’re honored to present Martha Collins, this year’s recipient of the Golden Rose, one of America’s oldest literary prizes. We award the Rose to a poet who, through their poetry, inspires and encourages other writers and has made a significant mark on American poetry.

Martha Collins has published eleven books of poetry, most recently Casualty Reports (Pittsburgh, 2022) and Because What Else Could I Do (Pittsburgh, 2019); the latter won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. Her other publications include three books of poems that focus on race (Blue Front, White Papers, and Admit One: An American Scrapbook), and five co-translated volumes of Vietnamese poetry, most recently Dreaming the Mountain by Tuệ Sỹ (with Nguyen Ba Chung; Milkweed, 2023), a PEN America award finalist. She has also published several co-edited anthologies, including Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries (with Kevin Prufer; Graywolf, 2017).

Collins founded the U.Mass. Boston creative writing program and for ten years served as Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. Her website is marthacollinspoet.com.

We’ll be joined by violinist Elizabeth Burke, with music beginning at 2: 45 pm.

If you’re not able to attend in person, you can watch online! Register here.

The Longfellow Summer Arts Festival brings music, poetry, and community to the East Lawn of the Longfellow House on Sunday afternoons through the summer. All events are free and open to the public. For directions, parking, and accessibility information, see the Festival page.

In the event of inclement weather, the reading will be held indoors.