Forthcoming books include The Place One Is (Omnidawn 2022) and The Myth of Ariadne (Parlor Press 2022).
Martha Ronk has had intersecting careers as a professor of Renaissance Literature and as a poet. She received her PhD from Yale University and has written numerous articles on Shakespeare’s plays, focusing on the interplay of the verbal and visual—a topic in her poetry as well. Teaching classes on 17th century literature and on modern and contemporary poetry revived her practice of writing poems leading to poetry workshops at Bennington College. She has taught at Tufts University, Immaculate Heart College, Otis College of Art and Design, and for most of her career at Occidental College in Los Angeles where for many years she coordinated the campus-wide Creative Writing Program.
Ronk has published eleven books of poetry, most recently with Omnidawn Press: Silences 2019, Ocular Proof 2016 on photographs, and Transfer of Qualities 2013 (the title a quotation from Henry James), long-listed for the National Book Award. Her book, Partially Kept, published with Nighboat Books, is in dialogue with Sir Thomas Browne’s Garden of Cyrus; Vertigo with Coffee House Press pays homage to W.G. Sebald, and why/why not, UC Press, plays off to be or not to be and is indebted to the play, Hamlet. In a landscape of having to repeat, influenced by Freud’s essay on “Screen Memory,” won the PEN USA best poetry book of 2005.
Often in dialogue with other authors, Ronk sees her work taking shape in the spaces between various forms, vocabularies, and genres, each volume operating as a coherent whole rather than a series of individual poems. Besides the profound influences of other authors, Ronk has also focused her poems on paintings, photographs, ceramics, and photograms, and many of her books include ekphrastic poems. Her collection of short stories, Glass Grapes and other stories, utilizes a variety of obsessive, unreliable narrators; and her book on food, Displeasures of the Table—semi-autobiographical, satiric, appreciative of all cooks—recommends reading over eating.
She has received a NEA award, had residencies at MacDowell Colony and Djerassi. She received the Sterling Award for scholarly excellence at Occidental College. Ronk has had readings at numerous bookstores and other venues, was a visiting writer at the University of Montana, was an editor of poetry books published by Littoral Press, and has had work included in eight anthologies.