Charles Martin is a poet, translator of poetry, and occasional critic.

His eighth book of poems, The Khayyam Suite is available from The Johns Hopkins University Press as of Spring 2025. Johns Hopkins also published his two most recent books of poetry, Future Perfect and Signs & Wonders. Other books of poems include Starting from Sleep: New and Selected Poems (Overlook Press), What the Darkness Proposes, Steal The Bacon, (both from Johns Hopkins UP), Passages from Friday (Abattoir Editions) and Room for Error (University of Georgia Press).

He is also a translator of The Poems of Catullus, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the Medea of Euripides. With Gavin Flood, he has translated the Bhagavad Gita, and his translations from the Romanesco of G.G. Belli have appeared in magazines and anthologies.

As a critic, he is the author of the volume on Catullus in the Hermes Book series of Yale University Press and numerous essays in various journals on classical and contemporary poetry.

His work has appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, Literary Matters, and The Hopkins Review. It has been published in over 40 anthologies, including Best American Poetry, The Norton Anthology of Poetry, and War No More: Three Centuries of American Antiwar and Peace Writing.

Among his honors and awards are an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Creative Writing Fellowship Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and an Ingram Merrill creative writing achievement award. He has received a Bess Hokin Award from Poetry magazine, and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award of the Academy of American Poets, a Pushcart Prize Anthology Award, and has been a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize of the Academy of American Poets. He has had residencies at the Djerassi Foundation and at Ragdale. He was Poet in Residence for five years at the American Poets’ Corner at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine.

He has taught writing and literature at a variety of institutions: Queensborough Community College, The Writing Seminars at The Johns Hopkins University (and in the MFA Program of the Writing Seminars in Florence), The Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the University of the South School of Letters, the Stonecoast Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Maine, the West Chester University Poetry Conference on Form and Narrative, the Unterberg Center of the 92nd Street YMHA, and the Writers Voice YMCA in Syracuse.