ABOUT MARTHA
Martha Witt grew up in Hillsborough North Carolina, the setting of her first novel. In 2023, she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to travel to Ilhéus, Brazil, to complete research for her current novel. She has also received grants from the New York Times Foundation and the Thomas J. Watson Foundation and has held artist residencies at the Yaddo, Ragdale, VCCA, and Ascea colonies. In 2021, she was awarded a Cepell grant for translation and two residencies at the Casa delle Traduzioni in Rome, Italy. Her translations and short stories have appeared in several literary journals and anthologies. Martha is currently a professor of Creative Writing at William Paterson University, and she lives in New York City.
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IVY
February 2019
Annesa, one of Grazia Deledda’s most enigmatic and dramatic characters, battles with a guilt she suffers when her own strength tempts her to a crime that will save others who won’t save themselves. Annesa has tragically attached herself to the tree of the Decherchi family, once noble but now dry-rotting on hard times. Her lover, Paulu Decherchi, compares her to a suffocating ivy clinging to the dead trunk.
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Translated by Martha Witt and Mary Ann Frese Witt
"Deledda won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1926, writing fiction set in Sardinia, mining it deeply and evoking its people and their character. Ivy, Deledda’s third novel, was originally published in 1908 in Italian as L’Edera and has never been previously published in English."
BROKEN AS THINGS ARE: A NOVEL
February 2019
From the day that Morgan-Lee is born, her extraordinarily beautiful and withdrawn older brother, Ginx, is obsessed by her. Inhabiting their own parallel world, the two communicate through a secret language and make-believe stories; when Morgan-Lee begins to explore friendships beyond their closed circle, however, Ginx becomes increasingly disturbed. In luminous prose, Martha Witt explores the intense and private world inhabited by these siblings and the inevitable and necessary pain of their separation.
"Ms. Witt has staked out a territory somewhere between Harper Lee and Flannery O'Connor."