Martin Corless-Smith

Martin Corless-Smith is a poet, literary translator, essayist, and painter. He was born and raised in Worcestershire, England. He studied painting at the University of Reading before travelling to the United States in 1989 where he continued his visual studies and received an MFA in art from Southern Methodist University. His other degrees include an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Utah.

He is the author of thirteen poetry collections including, Golden Satellite Debris (Shearsman Books, 2024); The Melancholy of Anatomy (Shearsman Books, 2021); and English Fragments: A Brief History of the Soul (Fence Books, 2010). His translations include Odious Horizons: Some Versions of Horace (Miami University Press, 2019). He is also the author of a collection of essays, The Poet's Tomb (Parlor Press, 2020), and a novel, This Fatal Looking Glass (SplitLevel Texts, 2015).

Corless-Smith is the director of the creative writing MFA program and professor at Boise State University, where he is the founder and editor of the Free Poetry imprint publishing chapbooks since 2006 and books since 2020. He lives in Boise, Idaho.