In April, Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing Martha Collins’s book-length poem, Blue Front, was announced by the Cleveland Foundation as a winner of the 72nd annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards in the fiction category. Established in 1935 by Cleveland poet and civic activist Edith Anisfield-Wolf, the awards honor “works that contribute to society’s understanding of racism and foster an appreciation of the rich diversity of human cultures.” It is the only juried literary award of its kind.

    Collins’s book, which falls into the fiction category due to the award’s submission guidelines, not by any fluke of miscategorization, is a collage of history, poetry, interview, myth and speculation. It focuses on the lynching of a black man falsely accused of murder in Cairo, Illinois in 1909. The reader’s historical periscope is Collins’s father at age five, then employed selling fruit on the street, who witnessed the event alongside an enthusiastic crowd of 10,000.

    Blue Front was also named on the New York Public Library’s “25 Books to Remember from 2006,” and won the 2005 Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize. It is a finalist for an Ohioana Book Award; winners will be announced this August.

    Instead of relying on a linear narrative, Collins takes advantage of her removed perspective and composes the poem as a kind of detective. Reading or listening to the poem is a little like going through an attic crammed with shoeboxes — Collins makes use of fragments from newspaper clippings, conversations with her father, interactions with people from Cairo and her own reflections on loaded words like “hang” and “shoot.”

    Collins, on sabbatical this year to promote Blue Front, gave a reading as a part of the Firelands Association for the Visual Arts’s Main Street Reading Series on Sunday, November 26, 2006. She shared the podium with another prolific poet, Donald R. Longman Professor Emeritus of English and Creative Writing David Young, also an editor of the prestigious FIELD magazine published by the Oberlin College Press. Young read poems from his latest collection, Black Lab, published by Random House in February 2006.

    Collins is also the author of four previous collections of poems. She is “very pleased” about the prize, and finds its terms particularly relevant to her recent work.

    “It certainly seems apt to me,” she said. “Some people have asked me why a white person would want to write about [racism and lynching]...[The answer is that] it’s the history of white people. The interesting thing for me was writing about race as a white person.”

    Collins shares this year’s fiction honors with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of the novel Half of a Yellow Sun. The nonfiction award went to Scott Reynolds Nelson for his book on John Henry, Steel Drivin’ Man. Historian Taylor Branch also received recognition for lifetime achievement. Past winners of awards in various genres have included Ralph Ellison, Jonathan Kozol, Lucille Clifton and Chang-Rae Lee.

    The winners will be honored in a ceremony to be held in Cleveland on September 6, 2007.