Demetria Martinez

Demetria Martinez is an American activist, poet, and novelist. She was born on July 10, 1960 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She is a graduate of Princeton University with BA from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. She has been an editor for the National Catholic Review in Tucson, Arizona since 1990. She teaches in the annual William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts Boston. In 1988 Martinez was charged with conspiracy for allegedly transporting two Salvadoran women refugees into the US. She was later acquitted of the charges.

Confessions of a Berlitz-Tape Chicana won the best biography 2006 International Latino Book Award. In 1994 Mother Tongue won Western States Book Award for fiction. She won first prize at the Thirteenth Annual Chicano Literary Arts Contest, for the poem "Turning."