Martha Collins is the author, most recently, of Blue Front, a book-length poem based on a lynching her father witnessed when he was five years old in Cairo, Illinois, published May 2006 by Graywolf Press. Blue Front won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for 2006. It was also chosen as one of "25 Books to Remember from 2006" by the New York Public Library, and is a finalist for an Ohioana Book Award (winner to be announced in August, 2007). Collins has also published four collections of poems, two books of co-translations from the Vietnamese, and a recent chapbook of poems.

Her other awards include fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Witter Bynner Foundation, as well as three Pushcart Prizes, the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, and a Lannan residency grant.

A selection of poems from Blue Front won the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize in 2005; other selections from the book appeared in Kenyon Review and Ploughshares.

Collins founded the Creative Writing Program at UMass-Boston, and since 1997 has taught at Oberlin College, where she is Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing and one of the editors of FIELD magazine and Oberlin College Press.