Chloe Martinez is a poet, a translator, and a scholar of South Asian religions. She is Associate Director of Programming for the Center for Writing and Public Discourse at Claremont McKenna College, as well as Lecturer in CMC's Department of Religious Studies. She lives in Claremont, CA with her husband and two daughters. 

She is a graduate of Barnard College, where she was a Mellon Mays Fellow, and received the MA/PhD in Religious Studies from UC Santa Barbara. Her research and teaching interests include creative writing; religions of South Asia; medieval North Indian devotional movements; poetry and autobiography in South Asia; and South Asian American religious worlds. Her research has appeared in journals including The Medieval History Journal and South Asia​, and has been funded by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, AIIS, and SSRC-Mellon Mays. 

She is also a graduate of Boston University’s Creative Writing MA and the MFA for Writers at Warren Wilson College, where she was a Holden Scholar. She is the author of Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works, 2021) and Corner Shrine (Backbone Press, 2020), and co-editor, with Lisa Van Orman Hadley, of a collection of essays on writing and ADHD (University of Chicago Press, March 2026). She is currently at work on a book of translations of the poems of Mirabai. Her poems and translations have appeared in Ploughshares, POETRY, The Common, Agni, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere, and have been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize, as well as for Best New Poets and Best of the Net. She is the recipient of the Robert Fitzgerald Prize, the Anne Frydman Prize, and residencies from Hedgebrook, the Vermont Studio Center, and SWWIM. She is Assistant Editor for Beloit Poetry Journal and Poetry Editor for the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion.


Short bio:
Chloe Martinez is a poet, a translator, and a scholar of South Asian religions. She is the author of the collection Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works) and the chapbook Corner Shrine (Backbone Press). Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, POETRY, Prairie Schooner, Agni, and elsewhere. She works at Claremont McKenna College.

Photo credit: Adrianne Mathiowetz