2020 Petrichor Prize winner
“My fiction is about the emotional power of music and dance, the interplay of time and memory, the meaning of discipline, and love—always love—and death. I fell in love with the viola and with music when I began studying with Max Aronoff, a founding member of the Curtis String Quartet. Max taught me three life lessons: (1) The music is in the rests; (2) if you break things into component parts, you’ll figure out how to put together the whole; and (3) practice, practice, practice.”
Martha Anne Toll is a novelist and literary and cultural critic. Her debut novel, Three Muses, won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction and was subsequently published by Regal House Publishing (2022). Her next novel, Duet for One, will appear in Spring 2025. Three Muses won wide praise from national outlets including the Washington Post, New York Magazine’s Vulture, NPR, and LA Parent, and was shortlisted for the Gotham Book Prize. Toll is a recipient of Fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Virginia and the South of France, Monson Arts, and Dairy Hollow. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, and serves on the Board of Directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.
A graduate of Yale, Toll holds a B.A. Degree in Music, and her classical music training informs her artistic practice. She holds a J.D. Degree from Boston University School of Law, and comes to writing professionally after a career dedicated to social justice. As the founding Executive Director of the Butler Family Fund, she developed and led programs to prevent and end homelessness, abolish the death penalty, and combat racial injustice and inequity in the U.S. criminal justice system. She established a partnership with the Oak Foundation in Geneva and London to achieve similar aims. Toll grew up in Philadelphia, and now lives with her climate activist husband in Washington, D.C. They are the lucky parents of two adult daughters.
