Martha Anne Toll is the 2020 Winner of the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction. Her debut novel, THREE MUSES, is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing, in Fall 2022. THREE MUSES also received an Honorable Mention for the 2020 Landmark Prize for Fiction [top five finalists], was long listed for the 2019 Dzanc Fiction Award [top 10 out of 700 entries], and was a finalist for the 2016 Mary Roberts Rinehart fiction contest.
Martha's fiction has appeared in Catapult, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, eMerge, Slush Pile Magazine, Yale's Letters Journal, Poetica E Magazine, and elsewhere.
Martha's essays and reviews appear regularly on NPR and in The Millions; as well as in the Washington Post, Washington Post's The Lily, The Rumpus, Bloom, Scoundrel Time, Music & Literature, Words Without Borders [forthcoming], After the Art, Narrative Magazine, [PANK] Magazine, Cargo Literary, Tin House blog, The Nervous Breakdown, Heck Magazine, and the Washington Independent Review of Books. Her personal essay, "Dayenu," was selected for an anthology featuring a range of well-known writers. Martha has been a nominator and critic for NPR's annual book concierge since 2017.
The themes in Martha's fiction include the emotional power of music, the interplay of time and memory, and the disciplined life. At Tin House Writers’ Workshop, Martha worked with Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Harding, and novelist Pauls Toutonghi. At the Colgate Writers’ Conference, she worked with novelist Brian Hall. She was a 2017 and 2018 Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and was a 2019 fellow at VCCA's Moulin à Nef. Martha was also awarded a 2019 residency at Monson Arts and at Dairy Hollow for 2020. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, and serves as a frequent interviewer at Washington DC's beloved independent bookstore Politics & Prose as well as at bookstores around the country.
Martha recently completed 26 years as the Founding Executive Director of the Washington, DC-based Butler Family Fund, a path-breaking social justice philanthropy governed by a family board in the US and the UK. Martha led the Fund's strategies and programming, with a deep commitment to racial equity in all of its work. Under Martha's leadership the Fund developed its two major funding areas: advocacy to prevent and end homelessness and advocacy to reform criminal justice, with particular focus on abolishing the death penalty and ending the sentence of juvenile life without parole. Martha led the formation of a long-term partnership with the Geneva-based Oak Foundation, helping to expand Oak's US footprint and to catalyze national work around employing people experiencing homelessness, ending the connection between criminal justice involvement and homelessness, and working to de-fund the criminal justice system. Martha continues to serve on the board of Funders Together to End Homelessness and has been an active member of 8th Amendment Project’s collaborative dedicated to the abolition of the death penalty in the U.S.
Martha grew up in suburban Philadelphia and majored in music at Yale University, where she won the Dante Society of America’s prize for the best essay written by an undergraduate at an American or Canadian university. She performed as a violist in the Yale Symphony and numerous chamber music groups and other ensembles. She studied viola with Max Aronoff, a founding member of the Curtis String Quartet, and Lillian Fuchs, faculty at the Juilliard School. Martha received her law degree from the Boston University School of Law.
To contact Martha, please click here.
Martha's fiction has appeared in Catapult, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, eMerge, Slush Pile Magazine, Yale's Letters Journal, Poetica E Magazine, and elsewhere.
Martha's essays and reviews appear regularly on NPR and in The Millions; as well as in the Washington Post, Washington Post's The Lily, The Rumpus, Bloom, Scoundrel Time, Music & Literature, Words Without Borders [forthcoming], After the Art, Narrative Magazine, [PANK] Magazine, Cargo Literary, Tin House blog, The Nervous Breakdown, Heck Magazine, and the Washington Independent Review of Books. Her personal essay, "Dayenu," was selected for an anthology featuring a range of well-known writers. Martha has been a nominator and critic for NPR's annual book concierge since 2017.
The themes in Martha's fiction include the emotional power of music, the interplay of time and memory, and the disciplined life. At Tin House Writers’ Workshop, Martha worked with Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Harding, and novelist Pauls Toutonghi. At the Colgate Writers’ Conference, she worked with novelist Brian Hall. She was a 2017 and 2018 Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and was a 2019 fellow at VCCA's Moulin à Nef. Martha was also awarded a 2019 residency at Monson Arts and at Dairy Hollow for 2020. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, and serves as a frequent interviewer at Washington DC's beloved independent bookstore Politics & Prose as well as at bookstores around the country.
Martha recently completed 26 years as the Founding Executive Director of the Washington, DC-based Butler Family Fund, a path-breaking social justice philanthropy governed by a family board in the US and the UK. Martha led the Fund's strategies and programming, with a deep commitment to racial equity in all of its work. Under Martha's leadership the Fund developed its two major funding areas: advocacy to prevent and end homelessness and advocacy to reform criminal justice, with particular focus on abolishing the death penalty and ending the sentence of juvenile life without parole. Martha led the formation of a long-term partnership with the Geneva-based Oak Foundation, helping to expand Oak's US footprint and to catalyze national work around employing people experiencing homelessness, ending the connection between criminal justice involvement and homelessness, and working to de-fund the criminal justice system. Martha continues to serve on the board of Funders Together to End Homelessness and has been an active member of 8th Amendment Project’s collaborative dedicated to the abolition of the death penalty in the U.S.
Martha grew up in suburban Philadelphia and majored in music at Yale University, where she won the Dante Society of America’s prize for the best essay written by an undergraduate at an American or Canadian university. She performed as a violist in the Yale Symphony and numerous chamber music groups and other ensembles. She studied viola with Max Aronoff, a founding member of the Curtis String Quartet, and Lillian Fuchs, faculty at the Juilliard School. Martha received her law degree from the Boston University School of Law.
To contact Martha, please click here.