Chloe Martinez, Ph.D.

Associate Director of Programming for the Center for Writing and Public Discourse; Lecturer, Religious Studies

Department

Religious Studies

Areas of Expertise

Hinduism
India
Literature
Religious Studies
South Asia
Writing

Biography

Chloe Martinez (she/her) is a scholar of South Asian religions and a poet. She is the 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. Her research on religion has appeared in journals including The Medieval History Journal and South Asia​, and has been funded by organizations including the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, AIIS, and SSRC-Mellon Mays. 

She is the author of the poetry collection Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works, 2021) and the chapbook Corner Shrine (Backbone Press, 2020). Her poems and translations have appeared in Ploughshares, POETRY, The Common, AGNIPrairie 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. Her translations have won the Robert Fitzgerald Prize and the Anne Frydman Prize. She is a visiting editor at Beloit Poetry Journal and the poetry editor of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion.

Education

B.A. Barnard College; M.A. and Ph.D. University of California, Santa Barbara; M.A. Boston University; M.F.A. Warren Wilson College

Awards and Affiliations

2023 Anne Frydman Translation Prize, The Hopkins Review

Fellowship in Sikh Studies, Global Institute for Sikh Studies, 2016-2019

Mellon Mays University Fellows Dissertation Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, 2012-2013

The Holden Scholarship, The MFA for Writers at Warren Wilson College, 2007-2009

Hindi Language Fellowship, American Institute of Indian Studies, 2003-2004

Central Opportunity Fellowship & Rowny Fellowship, UC Santa Barbara, 2001-2005

Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, Barnard College, 1998-2001

Research and Publications

"Notes on Translating Mirabai," The Journal of Vaishnava Studies 30.2 (Spring 2022): 19-26.

Mirabai, "Mira's Colors" (translation), Poetry Magazine (May 2022).

"The God Structure," The Common 18 (Fall 2019).

"Gathering the Threads: Religious Autobiography in Pre-Colonial South Asia," The Medieval History Journal 18:2 (2015): 250-277.