Grad Student Profile: Samuel Martin

I am in the fourth year of my Ph.D. program at MUN and my SSHRC funded research is into explorations of the post-secular turn in contemporary arts, thought, and culture. During my time at MUN I have had the opportunity to present conference papers on poetry, fiction, and artwork related to this research at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Brussels, Belgium), the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada), and the University of Melbourne (Melbourne, Australia). My dissertation is focused on “sacramental readings” of contemporary Atlantic Canadian fiction and I will be presenting a chapter from my thesis on novelist David Adams Richards at the 19^th Atlantic Canada Studies Conference, “Contested Regional Identities” (4-6 May 2012) at the University of New Brunswick in St. John.

Alongside my academic work I also write creatively. My collection of linked stories, This Ramshackle Tabernacle (Breakwater 2010), was long-listed for the ReLit Award and short-listed for the BMO Winterset Award. My short stories, creative nonfiction, and book reviews have appeared in Image, Riddle Fence, Canadian Literature, Relief, Cuffer Anthology III, The Telegram, Comment, the Christian Courier, and QWERTY. And my first novel, A Blessed Snarl, is forthcoming from Breakwater Books in 2012.

I have also recently been awarded a Writer Residency through the Fogo Island Arts Corporation to work on a novel-in-progress. And I run the arts and literary blog Dark Art Cafe.