M.L. Martin is an interdisciplinary poet and translator whose current work explores the power of ekphrasis as a mode of critique. Her collection of ekphrastic prose poems, called Theater of No Mistakes (forthcoming from Anhinga Press), is in conversation with the work of the American Surrealist painter Philip C. Curtis and the mise en scène of the Sonoran desert, and contain a feminist ecopoetics—from an oblique angle.
Her language-based installation, Journey to Shoshone Falls, uses archival material and found texts to create textual interventions in the archival landscape of a masterwork, and was shown at The Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma from October 2019—March 15, 2020. Her micro-chapbook of the same name is now available from Walls Divide Press. Her poetry has appeared in Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, EVENT: Poetry & Prose, The Fiddlehead, Interim, The Massachusetts Review, PRISM international, and many other Canadian and American literary journals.
Her work in translation aims to revise the critical interpretation and reception of the enigmatic Anglo-Saxon poem known as “Wulf and Eadwacer,” and to recover this radical female text to the feminist and experimental canons to which it belongs. Her experimental translations of Old English can be found in ANMLY, Arkansas International, Brooklyn Rail In Translation, The Black Warrior Review, The Capilano Review, Columbia Journal, The Cortland Review, The Kenyon Review Online, The Literary Review, Lunch Ticket, Poetry in Action, and Waxwing.
She is the recipient of the Theresa A. Wilhoit Fellowship, the Inprint Verlaine Prize in Poetry, and has received grants from Bread Loaf and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She recently completed a two-and-a-half-year fellowship with Tulsa Artist Fellowship, where she made many interdisciplinary performances, and founded the Translation Now! symposium. She has taught creative writing and literature in Tempe (AZ), Vancouver (BC), The Bronx (NY), Houston (TX), and Tulsa (OK), and currently divides her time between Edmonton and New York.
