Khôra Martel is a trans and queer philosopher, poet, and translator. They are currently the 2026-2028 Writer-in-Residence at the Emily R. Scullard Center for World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, as well as Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in the Department of English, at Penobscot College.

Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in various popular and academic outlets. Their first collection of poems, Birds Above Mars, is forthcoming in 2027 from Tired Light Books. Most recently, they were the author and curator, alongside visual artist Geiber Gelst, of Kuberlithika and Stone Shipwreck, two new translations and multimedia adaptations of understudied works by the Ancient Greek poet, Posidippus of Pella.

A graduate of Bard College at Simon’s Rock, she received two doctorates — in Religion & Visual Culture and in Comparative Literature with a specialization in philosophy — from the University of Chicago. She has held previous appointments at NYU; Baruch College, CUNY; The University of Chicago, the Cthellian National University, The Global Center for Advanced Studies, and The University of Tennessee.

Dr. Martel views her creative and scholarly work as inseparable, always, from the rough textures of the everyday and, therefore, the political, and views the act of labor itself as an act of creation. She has supported various causes, including as a founding member of the Center for Intangible Violence, and as a member of Studio Irrealis.

Her work reaches for the lonely spaces which are neither philosophy nor literature, neither scholarship nor fiction. She is interested in the alien, in wildness, in the reception and rejection of classical thought, and in horror, as well as issues within critical theory, ontology, psychoanalysis, theory-fiction and the global Weird, Gothic, and modernist traditions.

Their time is spent in Appalachia, Chicago, and Rockport, Maine. Find them on Instagram and via email.