Amelia Martens

AMELIA MARTENS is the author of The Spoons in the Grass are There To Dig a Moat (2016), a book of prose poems, selected by Sarabande Books for the 2014 Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature. She received both an MFA in Creative Writing and an MS in Literacy, Culture, and Language Education from Indiana University and currently serves as a training facilitator working with folks who experience multiple barrier to employment. Her work has been supported by a 2021 Artist Enrichment Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, a 2019 Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council, a Sustainable Arts Fellowship to Rivendell Writer’s Colony in 2017, an Artist Enrichment Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women in 2016, and an Emerging Artist Grant from the Kentucky Arts Council in 2011. She is a recent Pushcart nominee and the author of four poetry chapbooks: Ursa Minor (winner of the 2017 Prose Poetry Prize from elsewhere magazine, 2018), A Series of Faults (Finishing Line Press, 2014), Clatter (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2013), and Purgatory (winner of the Spring 2010 Black River Chapbook competition; Black Lawrence Press, 2012). Recent poems appear: Cream City Review, Still: The Journal, Southern Indiana Review, and Sweet: A Literary Confection. She is married to the poet Britton Shurley; they have two smart/beautiful/brave daughters and a ridiculous dog.