CD Collins

About CD Collins

CD Collins has published a collection of short stories, Blue Land (Polyho Press), a collection of poetry, Self Portrait With Severed Head (Ibbetson Street Press), and a novel, Afterheat (Empty City Press). As one of the originators of the resurgence of spoken word with live music in Boston in the early 1990’s, Collins’ work is represented in five compact discs. Her first album, Kentucky Stories, won Best Spoken-Word album at the Boston Poetry Awards. Her most recent album, Night Animals, is comprised of songs and stories with her musical partner, Santon, a blind, autistic musical savant and summa cum laude graduate of Berklee College of Music in Boston.

Collins’ short stories have appeared in numerous national literary magazines including, Phoebe, StoryQuarterly, Salamander, Imagine, and The Pennsylvania Review.

Collins has performed and appeared at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Berklee College of Music Performance Hall, the New York Public Library, the Boston Public Library, Club Passim, Charles Playhouse, and Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art.

Collins has received grants and awards from The Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Massachusetts College of Art, the Somerville Arts Council, the St. Botolph Club, the Cambridge Arts Council, the Malden Arts Council, the Massachusetts Arts Council, and Women Waging Peace.

She holds a B.A. and an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Kentucky, where she studied with author and environmentalist Wendell Berry. She pursued graduate studies at Harvard University Extension in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she studied under author Pamela Painter, who encouraged her to submit her stories for publication and became Collins’ mentor.

Collins’ current projects include a limited-edition book centered on her hometown, Mt. Sterling, Kentucky, titled The Big Little Town, and her sixth compact disc of spoken word with music, titled Camargo Rain.

Praise for CD Collins

“Laurie Anderson meets William Faulkner”
— Stephen McCauley, novelist

“Poetry + Music = Magic”
— Hannah Bordas, Bay Windows

“Broad distinctions of class and a variety of manners are depicted with a sure hand…genuine artistic maturity…language is very good indeed and will always fetch money from home.”
— James B. Hall, Literary Magazine Review

“CD Collins, a feisty Kentuckian in black gloves draped with silver chains, (part of the) decidedly eclectic crowd in the Writers’ Room of Boston.”
— Sally Jacobs, The Boston Globe

“Slow, seductive, teases you, tantalizes you…as deep and rich as the Kentucky soil from whence she came… she melts icy places in even the coldest heart.”
— The Boston Poet

“Trenchant.”
—Elizabeth McKim, poet