Martha Anne Toll's fiction has appeared in Catapult, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, eMerge, Slush Pile Magazine, Yale's Letters Journal, Inkapture Magazine, Referential Magazine, and Poetica E-Magazine. Her essays and reviews appear regularly on NPR and in The Millions; as well as in Washington Post's The Lily, The Rumpus, Bloom, Scoundrel Time, After the Art [forthcoming] Narrative Magazine, [PANK] Magazine, Cargo Literary, Tin House blog, The Nervous Breakdown, Heck Magazine, and the Washington Independent Review of Books. Martha was a nominator and critic for NPR's 2017, 2018, and 2019 book concierge. A four-time finalist in Glimmer Train writing contests, Martha won the Dante Society of America’s prize for the best essay written by an undergraduate at an American or Canadian university.
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. Martha's novel in process was longlisted for the 2019 Dzanc Fiction Award [top 10 out of 700 entries] and shortlisted for the 2016 Mary Roberts Rinehart fiction contest. 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.
Martha is the 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. The Butler Family Fund is deeply committed to racial equity in all of its work and supports advocacy to prevent and end homelessness and reform the criminal justice system, with particular focus on abolishing the death penalty and ending the sentence of juvenile life without parole. Martha serves on the board of Funders Together to End Homelessness and is an active member of 8th Amendment Project’s collaborative dedicated to the abolition of the death penalty in the U.S. She speaks at conferences around the country as well as frequently contributing to philanthropic publications.
Martha grew up in suburban Philadelphia and majored in music at Yale University, performing 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 learn more about Martha, visit marthaannetoll.com.
