Valerie Martin

Professor of English

Specialization
Creative writing; contemporary women's writing, the short story, Nineteenth Century American and British Literature

Valerie Martin is a novelist and short story writer. She is the author of nine novels including Italian Fever, Property, and Trespass. Her most recent novel, The Confessions of Edward Day (Nan A. Talese/Random House), a fictional memoir set in the theatre world of 1970s New York, was picked as a New York Times Notable book for 2009. Martin also has published three collections of short stories, and a biography of St. Francis of Assisi.

In 1990, her novel Mary Reilly, which purports to be the diary of Dr. Jekyll's housemaid, won the Kafka prize and was translated into 16 languages. In 1996, a film adaptation of the novel was released by TriStar Pictures; the film was directed by Stephen Frears. Martin's novel Property, narrated by a woman slave-owner in antebellum New Orleans, won Britain's Orange Prize in 2003 and was short-listed for France's Prix Femina Etranger.

Martin has taught at the University of New Mexico at Las Cruces, the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, the University of New Orleans, the University of Massachusetts, and Sarah Lawrence College. At Mount Holyoke, she teaches introduction to creative writing, short story writing, and contemporary women's short fiction.

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