Works by
Martha Marinara
(Writer)

Fiction

• Street Angel (2006) -- Nominated 2006 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Debut Fiction
  Marked by rich detail and glowing descriptions, the text transports its readers to a place where women live in close proximity, grieve and celebrate together, and generally share their lives in the wonderfully boundless and boundary-less style of found families. When Terry beats Birdie, Patty and Colleen and Athena and Guinevere rush to Birdie's side, offering her both comfort and practical assistance. When Faith struggles to support Laura Grace Thompson is present as kind neighbor, committed therapist, and even mentor to Faith. The same Grace Thompson shows up as Dr. Thompson when Colleen, Patty's orphaned niece, needs help resolving her difficult feelings about her parents' sudden death. Essentially, the lives in the novel's chapter/vignettes rustle toward and away from one another in that easy, familiar way our own lives rustle toward and away from those of the women in our own found families. Readers will find in this book a sense of envelopment, of belonging, of emotional connection.
  
  Reading Street Angel is a delight, a Sunday afternoon wrapped in soft blankets, falling in love, weeping for lost relationships, and finding new friends. It's the familiarity of the stories-told as they are in luscious detail and rendered in language thick with poetic undertones-that brings us home to a community built of the strange and awesome moments that keep us always in relation to one another.

-- Michelle Gibson, Women's Studies
 University of Cincinnati

Non-fiction

• Writing Outside the Lines: Stories of Literacy (1999) with Peggy Ellington