Martha Batiz
Dr. Martha Batiz was born and raised in Mexico City, but has been living in Toronto since 2003. Her articles, chronicles, reviews and short stories have appeared in diverse newspapers and magazines not only in her homeland, but also in Spain, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Peru, Ireland, England, the United States and Canada. Her first book was a short-story collection called A todos los voy a matar (I’m Going To Kill Them All, Castillo Press, 2000). Her award-winning novella Boca de lobo was originally published in Spanish both in the Dominican Republic and in Mexico (Boca de lobo, in 2007 and 2008, respectively), was launched as an ebook by INK Press in the summer of 2015, and then in a brand new print edition by Lugar Común Editorial in 2019. It has been translated and published in English as The Wolf’s Mouth (Exile Editions, 2009) and Damiana’s Reprieve (Exile Editions, 2019), and in French as La Gueule Du Loup (Lugar Común Editorial, 2018).
Her second short-story collection in Spanish is titled De tránsito (In Transit), it was published in 2014 in Puerto Rico by Terranova Editores, and received an honorary mention in the International Latino Book Awards in San Francisco in 2015. Martha has since written her first short-story collection entirely in English, Plaza Requiem: Stories at the Edge of Ordinary Lives (Exile Editions, 2017), which won the International Latino Book Award for Best Popular Fiction in English in Los Angeles in 2018. Martha edited the anthology Desde el norte: Narrativa canadiense contemporánea (UAM, 2015), featuring prominent Canadian authors translated into Spanish, and is also part of the editorial committee of the successful books Historias de Toronto and Historias de Montreal (Lugar Común, 2016 and 2019, respectively). She holds a PhD in Latin American Literature and is an ATA-certified literary translator. Besides being the founder and instructor of the Creative Writing in Spanish courses currently offered by the School of Continuing Studies at the University of Toronto, where she recently received the Career Impact Award, she is a part-time Professor at York University/Glendon College, where she teaches Spanish language and literature as well as translation. In 2014, Martha was featured in Latinos Magazine among the Top Ten Most Successful Mexicans in Canada. In 2015, she was chosen as one of the Top Ten Most Influential Hispanic-Canadians.