J. Michael Martinez was born and raised in Greeley, Colorado.

He is the recipient of the 2006 Five Fingers Review Poetry Prize and is co-editor and co-founder of Breach Press.

[2] In 2009, Martinez's poetry collection Heredities was selected by Juan Felipe Herrera for the Academy of American Poets' Walt Whitman Award for first book publication.

About his work, Herrera wrote: Heredities breaks away from four decades of inquiry into cultural identity.

Martinez's exhilarating descent into the unspoken—lit by metaphysical investigations, physiological charts, and meta-translations of Hernán Cortés's accounts of his conquests—gives voice to a dismembered continental body buried long ago.