Kelley Martin

Originally from West Virginia, Kelley received her MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts from the University of Baltimore for her work of memoir/nonfiction, A Place Called Solid. Her nonfiction and poetry has appeared in Now and Then Magazine, Mountain Echoes, SN Review, the Appalachian Independent, Palooka Literary Journal, and the Anthology of Appalachian Literature.

Kelley served as editor for numerous literary journals, including the Sandhills Review and Obsidian III: Literature of the African Diaspora and also managed Carolina Wren Press in Durham, NC, which specializes in literature written by and for underrepresented audiences. Kelley worked in various capacities in arts management as well as in continuing education at UNC-Chapel Hill. For the last several years, she has been teaching at various universities, such as Stevenson, Shepherd, and Towson Univerisites as well the Universities of Baltimore and Maryland. Currently, she teaches at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virgnia.

Her book, "A Place Called Solid" is a story about a Scottish family who immigrated and settled in the mountains of West Virginia during the creation of America as early as 1658. Rae traces her family through the mountains into the bars and churches littered with the faithful and the hypocritical, the alcoholics and the teetotalers, the sad and the humorous. The characters are all refugees from elsewhere who attempt to create a new home in the unforgiving mountains of West Virginia only to fight with nature and each other in the process. What they once ran from, they now recreate in their new life and hand it to their children . . . children who carry the burden onto their own. But Rae ends the suffering by bringing to light the pain and the wrong that haunts her ancestors. She tells the story of her grandmother and mother through their female ancestors, attempting to make sense of a fractured and ghost-like past filled with bars and baptisms. Sometimes funny and sometime irreverent, Rae gives life to the dead to which she belongs.