Chelsea Martin

Chelsea Martin is a writer and artist living in Spokane, WA. She grew up in an impoverished town in Northern California, where making art and writing became forms of entertainment for her. In 2004 she was accepted at California College of the Arts in the Bay Area to study painting. Her previous small town worldview clashed dramatically with the art, intellectualism, money, and ambition of this new, highly cultured art school environment. This clash left a lasting impression on her work, informing the accessibility, use of humor, brevity, realism, and the questions about class and personal isolation her work contains. She published her first book of stories, Everything Was Fine Until Whatever, in 2009. Since then she has published five more books: The Really Funny Thing About Apathy (2010), Even Though I Don’t Miss You (2013), Mickey (2016), Caca Dolce: Essays from a Lowbrow Life (2017), and the graphic novel Heavy-Handed (2018), as well as several chapbooks and self-published zines. She currently works as a freelance writer, with work published in Nylon, The Cut, Electric Literature, Buzzfeed, Lenny Letter, and The Inlander. In 2017, she co-founded Spokane Zine Fest, an annual one-day event celebrating artists and writers in the Pacific Northwest.

Chelsea received 2019 GAP Award funding for Notes for My Autobio Docudrama, a novel in vignettes exploring a young art student’s shifting relationships with her troubled family members as she attempts to figure out her own artistic identity. This critical funding will be used for childcare while she finishes this project.

Artist Trust thanks the Amazon Literary Partnership for underwriting this award through Artist Trust’s Corporate Partnership program. For information about supporting Washington State artists, visit here.