"Most students of creative writing are too good at being students. They are cautious and risk averse. They have not learned to welcome failure and despair. I want them to stop thinking of themselves as students with assignments and deadlines imposed by some professor or program and begin to see themselves as artists, as writers," says Associate Professor of English Gregory Martin.
Photo: Associate Professor Gregory Martin
He was hired at UNM to implement a creative nonfiction concentration within the creative writing program and his students, who are all required to submit a manuscript for publication in a magazine have been published in literary journals, in anthologies, and had their work read aloud on National Public Radio. Martin mentors student writers with an emphasis on the process of revision and peer review.
Martin has already received the Keleher Award for Outstanding Assistant Professor of English and the Gunter Starkey Teaching Award from UNM’s College of Arts and Sciences. He also wrote “Mountain City”, a memoir of the life of a town of thirty-three people in remote northeastern Nevada. That book received a Washington State Book Award and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
His students describe him as demanding, inspiring and kind. This fall he will be teaching Senior Honors Thesis, Individual Study, Creative Writing Workshop-Creative Nonfiction, Problems for the Master’s Degree, Problems for the Doctor’s Degree, and Dissertation.
Media Contact: Karen Wentworth, (505) 277-5627; email: kwent2@unm.edu