Brent Martin lives in the Cowee community in western North Carolina and is the full-time director of the Blue Ridge Bartram Trail Conservancy.  He has served as the Southern Appalachian Regional Director for the Wilderness Society, Executive Director of Georgia Forestwatch, and Associate Director of the Land Trust for the Little Tennessee, now Mainspring Conservation Trust. He has an M.A. and ABD in History from Georgia State University and worked for several years on a dissertation on historical land use patterns in the northwest Georgia mountains.  He is a recipient of the Southern Environmental Law Center’s Southern Environmental Leadership Award and served for two years as the North Carolina Poetry Society’s Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for the West. He is the author of George Masa’s Wild Vision: A Japanese Immigrant Imagines Western North Carolina, winner of the 2022 Wolfe Memorial Literary Prize, and The Changing Blue Ridge Mountains: Essays on Journeys Past and Present.