Martha Ronk is an internationally recognized, award winning poet and writer whose most recent publications include the National Poetry Series award winner Vertigo (Coffeehouse Press), and the story collection Glass Grapes (BOA Editions).  Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines including Ploughshares, Chicago Review, Poetry LA, LA Weekly, The Antioch Review, Crazy Horse, The Harvard Review and New American Writing.  Ronk is an NEA grant recipient (2007), and was the 2005 PEN USA award winner for best poetry book, the 2002 Lynda Hull Poetry Award winner for best poem and a MacArthur Research Grant recipient.  Her readings and residencies include the NYC Poetry Project, AWP Georgia, Muses at the Armory Arts Center, Pasadena, Opera Stabile, Hamburg, Germany and three residencies at The MacDowell Colony.  Ronk lives in Los Angeles, California, where she is the Irma and Jay Price Professor of English at Occidental College.

"…Ronk's sincere desire to comprehend a reality that refuses to hold still for analysis generates an unexpected and uniquely human warmth."  Boston Review  "…An airy, evanescent tone and long, drifting sentences that blend memory with the present…at the intersection of meditative investigation and day-to-day domesticity. "  Publishers Weekly  "…landscapes: of the mind, the body, the past, the present, the possible, the impossible, the knowable, the unknowable, the sublime, and the necessary."  American Book Review  "As she states, 'Objects have no thoughts about anything else.' Yet humans do, and Ronk manufactures her unique memory from that slippery stash of the ordinary."  Rain Taxi