Dawn Lundy Martin’s collaboration with architect V. Mitch McEwan and visual artist Sienna Shields House OperaOpera House has received funding from the Graham Foundation. “Inspired by the flexibility of uses for houses in Detroit, in proximity to major cultural institutions for opera and diverse forms of performance,” House OperaOpera House “stages an opera as a house and its dramas of occupancy and vacancy, demolition, and repurposing, as an opera. The project explores how zoning, planning, and building code changes support local cultural assets while it develop “a suite of spatial and architectural tactics to facilitate this exploration of performance, community, and form. The experimental aspects architecturally include strategies of interactivity, portability, and expanded territories of adaptive re-use.”
Martin is the author of A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering (University of Georgia Press, 2007), recipient of the Cave Canem Prize; DISCIPLINE (Nightboat Books, 2011), selected by Fanny Howe for the Nightboat Books Poetry Prize and finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award; Candy, a limited edition letterpress chapbook (Albion Books, 2011); and The Morning Hour, selected by C.D. Wright for the 2003 Poetry Society of America’s National Chapbook Fellowship. Her forthcoming book, Life in a Box is a Pretty Life, will be published by Nightboat Books in 2014. Martin has lectured on race, gender, and poetics at universities across the country, including most recently, Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and theUniversity of California at Berkeley. She is associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/dawn-lundy-martin(photograph by Andrew Kenower)