Geoff Martin

I’m a writer and editor who moved home to Kitchener, Ontario, Canada in 2021. Raised just north of the city, I’ve lived and worked around the Great Lakes region: planting pulp-and-paper forests northwest of Lake Superior, shuffling portable classrooms throughout the Golden Horseshoe around Lake Ontario, and teaching writing from the edge of Lake Michigan in Chicago.

I studied English and history at Western University and hold an MA in Literature from McMaster University. From 2011-2017, I taught English at Truman College (City Colleges of Chicago) where I also served as Learning Communities Coordinator and Chair of Assessment. I took up writing and editing full-time during a two-year stint in Western Massachusetts and then lived in San Francisco until the summer of 2021. When not writing or editing—or infant pottying—these last few years, I’ve been reading CNF submissions as a Contributing Editor at Barren Magazine.

On the page, I’m drawn to the backdrop of a story, its landscape and location, or what the Midwestern writer Michael Martone calls, “the ground situation.” I’ve written about land and river histories, family stories, and matters of spirituality and the environment. I think the stories we tell from the places we live are, for better or for worse, world-making and therefore worthy of our great attention.