She earned a Ph.D. in English with an emphasis in Southern American literature from the University of Kentucky in 1991. A founding member of Joy Bale Boone's Rain Stick Poets, she researched and co-produced the documentary A Woman Named Joy in 1997. She has edited twenty-three issues of the oral history publication Broomsedge Chronicles, based on student interviews with people in south central Kentucky. With her ninety-year-old father, Eugene Martin, she writes a weekly oral history column for The Glasgow Daily Times. She lives with her husband, Harrell, on the family farm in Barren County, Kentucky, right between the home of her father and the home of her daughter and son-in-law, Ellen and Ben Lawrence.