Martha Andrews Donovan

Martha Andrews Donovan was educated at Williams College (B.A.) and Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English (M.A.). She has been teaching for twenty-eight years and is the recipient of several summer fellowships as well as the Charles P. Rimmer Award for Excellence in Teaching from the Pingree School.

Donovan has been actively involved in local, regional, and national communities of writers: along with Professors Maura MacNeil and Don Melander, she was a founding member of the Stone Bridge Poetry Project in Henniker, New Hampshire; she served as a liaison to the Board of the New Hampshire Young Writers’ Conference; she is an active member of the New Hampshire Writers’ Project; she has participated in writing workshops at The Frost Place Festival of Poetry in Franconia, New Hampshire, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and the Stonecoast Writers’ Conference in Freeport, Maine; she was selected to participate in the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s women writers’ retreat A Dream of Our Own: Women Writing New, Women Writing True held at Ghost Ranch in August 2011 where she presented a Mind Stretch on “Texture and Text” with her NEC colleague Professor Maura MacNeil.

Her poetry, critical essays, memoir, and feature articles have appeared in journals, magazines, and anthologies, including: English Journal; Entelechy International; Green Mountains Review; Harvard Review; Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors; Marlboro Review; NH Writer; Off the Coast; Pilgrimage; The Breath of Parted Lips: Voices From the Robert Frost Place, Volume II (CavanKerry Press 2004); Lethal Rejection: Stories on Crime and Punishment (Carolina Academic Press 2009); The 2010 Poets’ Guide to New Hampshire: More Places, More Poets (The Poetry Society of New Hampshire 2010); and Shadow and Light: A Literary Anthology on Memory (Monadnock Writers’ Group 2011). She has given readings and presentations of her work across New England, from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire for a Breath of Parted Lips reading to Bass Harbor Memorial Library on Mount Desert Island, Maine for a presentation of her research into the lives of foreign missionaries in India.

Donovan’s poetry chapbook Dress Her in Silk  (Finishing Line Press 2009) was awarded the Tacenda Literary Award/Best Book 2009 from BleakHouse Publishing, was nominated for a 2009 PEN New England Literary Award, and had been previously selected as one of ten finalists in the 2008 Philbrick Poetry Award competition. She was featured in 2009 on the New Hampshire Poet Showcase sponsored by the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. Her teaching excellence has been recognized by several awards, including a nomination for a CASE US Professor of the Year Award, numerous grants for summer study, and multiple inclusions in Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers and Who’s Who of American Women.

Donovan spent her recent sabbatical (Fall 2011) working on a mixed-genre memoir Dangerous Archaeology: A Daughter’s Search for Her Mother (and Others) – a memoir in fragments based on her research into the lives of three generations of family women who lived in rural India as family members of foreign missionaries. A multimedia exhibit of this work, including her collaboration with photographer and NEC alumna Autumn E. Monsees, will appear at the New England College Art Gallery this winter (2012).

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Donovan’s research interests include: multigenre writing, memoir writing, women’s narratives, missionary women, and the intersection of the textual and visual in life narratives.

Links

http://arohospeaks-writertowriter.posterous.com/80795012/