kari ann martindale

About the Artist

Kari Martindale (M.A., Linguistics) is a poet and spoken word artist who has read at Arts guilds across Maryland and performed at the White House.  She has been published in a number of literary journals and anthologies, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has received honorable mention in the Writer’s Digest Annual Competition.  She sits on the Board of Maryland Writers’ Association and the management team of EC Poetry & Prose. Kari has served on judging panels for Maryland State Arts Council and Poetry Out Loud, as a volunteer judge for slam competitions, and on judging and selection committees for anthologies.  Kari is a teaching artist for Armed Services Arts Partnership and a disabled Air Force veteran herself.  She was a writer-in-residence at Château d’Orquevaux in France in January 2024, for which she received a partial grant from Maryland State Arts Council. She freelances for the Frederick News Post, is multi-lingual, and has visited all 50 States and over 40 countries.

Artist's Statement

Since childhood, I have been playing with language.  This eventually led to an M.A. in Linguistics, which informs my semantic, phonological, prosodic, and syntactic choices.  As a young person, I played piano, which surfaces in the crescendos and decrescendos of my spoken word. In my 20s and 30s, I was a translator and interpreter.  Translation itself is an art, sculpting the abstract into meaningful communication, coming from a place of love and desire to foster understanding.  My years as an interpreter as well as years of teaching English as a Second Language have afforded me perspective into different points of view and approaches to thinking and communicating; and strengthened my sense of empathy–as did living in Germany for four years.  Arriving without speaking the language, struggling to communicate, and eventually operating in a foreign language on a daily basis greatly expanded my worldview. In general, my travel, including among over 40 countries and all 50 United States, filters into my work along with the languages I have spoken over the years: Spanish, Arabic, and German. I take great care to share my own experiences without speaking for anyone else.  My social justice poetry intends to challenge systems of oppression, change perceptions, and spur my own demographic into action.   In all cases, my poetry, whether remaining in free form or surfacing as haiku in the traditional 5-7-5 syllable structure, bears witness–be it to a beautiful landscape, a social injustice, nostalgia, a feeling, or an experience–and aims to give the reader or listener a new way to think about things.