Hugh Martin is a veteran of the Iraq war and a graduate of Muskingum University. His chapbook, So, How Was the War? (Kent State UP, 2010) was published by the Wick Poetry Center and his first book, The Stick Soldiers, won the 2012 Poulin Book Prize and will be released through BOA Editions in March of 2013. Martin's work has appeared in journals such as Crazyhorse, APR, and The Kenyon Review. He recently completed his MFA at Arizona State and will be a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University in the fall of 2012.

"The Stick Soldiers reveal[s] Iraq in all its real and imagined dangers in a language that is somber, angry, deeply reflective, but also intensely, if not darkly humorous.” The collection is an “approachable, necessary volume of poems about what it was like to prepare for war, serve in Iraq, and return to Ohio ‘a body / much less / without the plated-vest, the ammo.’” -M.K. Sukach, War Literature & the Arts