Valerie Martínez's first book of poems, Absence, Luminescent (Four Way Books, 1999), won the Larry Levis Prize and received a Greenwall Grant from the Academy of American Poets. Her poems and translations have appeared in many journals and anthologies including Parnassus, Puerto del Sol, LUNA, The Bloomsbury Review, Prairie Schooner, The Colorado Review and The Best American Poetry 1996. Her work appears in American Poetry: Next Generation; New American Poetry: A Breadloaf Anthology; and Touching the Fire: Fifteen Poets of Today's Latino Renaissance (Anchor/Doubleday, 1998);. Along with Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird, she edited the anthology Reinventing the Enemy's Language: Contemporary Native Women's Writing of North America (Norton, 1997). Martinez has degrees from Vassar College (B.A.) and the University of Arizona (M.F.A.). She has taught writing at universities in Arizona and New Mexico, and in the rural schools of Swaziland (southern Africa). She is currently on the English faculty at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania. Martínez is a native of Santa Fé, New Mexico.