Martin Rock is the author of Infinite Scroll (Tupelo Press, 2027), selected by Carolyn Forché for the Tupelo Berkshire Prize, and Residuum, editor’s choice for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Prize and a Foreword INDIE Book Award finalist. With Adrienne Perry and Kevin Prufer, he co-edited Other Legacies: Great Unsung American Poets (Wesleyan University Press, 2026). His chapbooks include Dear Mark (Brooklyn Arts Press) and Fish, You Bird (Pilot Books, co-written with Philip D. Ischy). He has been awarded the Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry, named runner-up for the Missouri Review Editors’ Prize, and his editorial work for Gulf Coast was recognized for excellence by the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP).

Martin teaches writing and climate justice at the University of California San Diego, and, with poets Kevin Prufer and Wayne Miller, co-directs The Unsung Masters Series, a literary organization that publishes one volume from a great but little-known writer each year. His editorial work often extends this practice of literary recovery. He also co-edited the critical volume Catherine Breese Davis: On the Life and Work of an American Master with Kevin Prufer and Martha Collins.

Martin’s poetry has appeared in Best American Experimental Writing, Best New Poets, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and has been published widely in literary journals including Georgia Review, AGNI, Colorado Review, Black Warrior Review, Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM, Conduit, and elsewhere. In 2024, the Japanese poet Shuntarō Tanikawa granted Martin permission to translate his second poetry collection, Sixty-two Sonnets. These and other translations from Japanese have appeared in Asymptote and Poetry International. As a literary editor, he has served as editor in chief of Washington Square Review and as managing editor at Gulf Coast and Epiphany.

He holds an MFA in poetry from New York University and a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston, with focus in literary criticism, environmental theory, creative writing pedagogy, and ecopoetics. He has received fellowships from NYU, the University of Houston, The Starworks Foundation, InPrint Houston, the Port Townsend Writing Conference, and the Periwinkle Foundation, and has taught writing and design at the Jackson Hole Writers Conference, California College of the Arts, Interlochen, WITS Creative Writing Camp, the Drew School Writers Festival, University of California San Diego, and New York University.

Martin also works as a freelance book designer and is available to teach book design workshops. He has designed books for Brooklyn Arts Press, Cleveland State University Poetry Center, Sarabande, Black Lawrence Press, and several other independent publishers, including many self-published authors.