J. Michael Martinez

J. Michael Martinez was born in Greeley, Colorado. He earned his BA from the University of Northern Colorado and his MFA from George Mason University. His first collection of poetry, Heredities (2010), received a Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Judge Juan Felipe Herrera chose the book for its “exhilarating descent into the unspoken” and noted, “[Martinez] gives voice to a dismembered continental body buried long ago.” His second book of poems is In the Garden of the Bridehouse (2014). Cornelius Eady selected his third collection, Museum of the Americas (2018), for the 2017 National Poetry Series. Martinez is also the author of the chapbooks And also a Fountain (2008), with James Belflower and Anne Heide; The Care With Which There Is (2007); and Pinned to a Quail’s Wings (2006). The Autumn Orchard, an opera for which he wrote the libretto, was performed by Colorado University’s New Opera Workshop.

Cofounder and coeditor of Breach Press, and poetry editor of NOEMI Press, Martinez has read, lectured, or taught at universities and organizations nationwide, including the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Conference, the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, Naropa University, the University of Colorado at Boulder, The Association of Writers and Writing Programs, the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, the Tuscon Festival of Books, Canto Mundo, George Mason University and elsewhere. He lives in Denver, Colorado, and he is pursuing a PhD in literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder.