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Examines the concept of race in the United States from the 1830s, when the abolitionists rose to prominence, until the 1880s, when the Jim Crow regime commenced. J. Michael Martinez argues that Lincoln and the Radical Republicans were the pivotal actors, albeit not the architects, that influenced this evolution.



About the Author

J. Michael Martinez

J. Michael Martinez was born and raised in Greeley, CO. He is a graduate of the University of Northern Colorado and received an M.F.A. from George Mason University. His poems have appeared in New American Writing, Five Fingers Review, The Colorado Review, and Crab Orchard Review, among others, and the anthology Junta: Avant-Garde Latino/a Writing. He is the recipient of the 2006 Five Fingers Review Poetry Prize and is co-editor and co-founder of Breach Press. In 2009, Martinez's collection Heredities was selected by Juan Felipe Herrera for the Academy of American Poets' Walt Whitman Award, and will be published by Louisiana State University Press. About his work, Herrera wrote: "Heredities breaks away from four decades of inquiry into cultural identity. Martinez's exhilarating descent into the unspoken - lit by metaphysical investigations, physiological charts, and meta-translations of Hernán Cortés's accounts of his conquests - gives voice to a dismembered continental body buried long ago. This body, though flayed and fractured, rises and sings. "Martinez is currently pursuing a Ph. D. in Literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder.



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