A Virtual Thirsty Lab with Rodger Martin

The Thirsty Lab poetry reading, normally based out of Princeton, Mass., continues to meet virtually. On Tuesday, July 22nd, 2025 Rodger Martin will be the featured reader. Please Click Here to register.

This year, Nature/Culture Books brought out Rodger Martin’s fifth book, The Sleeping Dogs of Lubec along with a new & revised edition of his first book, The Nemo Poems. For All The Tea in Zhōngguó was released in 2019. It follows The Battlefield Guide, and the selection of The Blue Moon Series, (all by Hobblebush Books) by Small Press Review as one of its bi-monthly picks of the year. Most recently he has been a major contributor for NatureCulure’s “Writing The Land” anthologies.

He is a touring artist for the New England States Touring Foundation administered by the New England Foundation for the Arts. He received the 2024 Stanley Kunitz Medal for his lifelong commitment to poetry. He’s also received an Appalachia award for poetry, a New Hampshire State Council on the Arts award for fiction, fellowships from The National Endowment for the Humanities to study T.S. Eliot and Thomas Hardy at Oxford University, and John Milton at Duquesne University. Meg Kearney chose one of his poems for permanent trail mounting at Cathedral of The Pines.

His work has been published in literary journals and anthologies throughout the United States and China where he also wrote a series of essays on American poetry for The Yangtze River Journal. He and six colleagues, as part of The Monadnock Pastoral Poets , have been featured in a book On the Monadnock: New Pastoral Poetry released in China

In 2007. In 2012, he represented the United States as one of twelve international poets participating in the City of Hangzhou’s literary festival on West Lake, China. In 2015 he was a visiting poet at Nanjing University and Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, where in 2017 his poem “The Anchor” has been mounted at the reflecting pool where it was inspired. He returned to Yancheng with six other American poets as part of the Poetry Bridging Continents III Conference. In addition to his writing, he teaches journalism and creative writing at Keene State College, plus co-advises The Equinox, the college’s national award-winning student news organization.

He was managing editor of The Worcester Review for almost three decades. He helped found and direct New Hampshire’s Poetry Out Loud Project. 2013 marked the completion of a decade long project with Dr. B. Eugene McCarthy to adapt all twelve books of the epic poem Paradise Lost for dramatic reading. His critical work “The Colonization of Paradise: Milton’s Pandemonium and Montezuma’s Tenochtitlan” [TAY-nosh-TIT-lan] published in Comparative Literature Studies broke new ground in Milton studies.

He was born in the amish country of Pennsylvania, lived in England as a child, and served as a combat engineer in Vietnam. You can find him in the woods of New Hampshire.