Ernesto Javier Martínez is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies (IRES). His work—both academic and artistic—explores how racially and sexually marginalized communities in the United States use art and culture to produce knowledge about their lives. He is the author of On Making Sense: Queer Race Narratives of Intelligibility (Stanford UP, 2012), as well as the co-editor of Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader (Duke UP, 2011) and The Truly Diverse Faculty: New Dialogues in American Higher Education (Palgrave, 2014). In children's media, he is best known for co-writing, with Jill Cozza-Turner, the animated kids movie Daniel Visits a New Neighborhood: The Movie (PBS Kids 2022), writing and producing the short film La Serenata, directed by Adelina Anthony (HBO Max, 2020-22), and writing the award-winning children’s book Cuando Amamos Cantamos/ When We Love Someone, We Sing to Them, illustrated by Maya Christina González (Reflection Press, 2018). For this work, he has received national and international recognition, including two International Latino Book Awards, the Lambda Literary Award, the Imagen Award (commonly known as the "Latin Golden Globes"), and the HBO Latinx Short Film Competition Award.
