Russell Martin's Picasso's War: The Destruction of Guernica, and the Masterpiece That Changed the World is published in hardcover by Dutton and in unabridged audio by Highbridge. He is the author of Beethoven's Hair (2000). Out of Silence, was named by the Bloomsbury Review as one of fifteen best books of its first fifteen years of publication.  A Story That Stands Like A Dam: Glen Canyon and the Struggle for the Soul of the West (1989), won the Caroline Bancroft History Prize.
He is a graduate of The Colorado College in Colorado Springs, where he has returned to teach for eighteen years. He spent a postgraduate year on a Thomas Watson Foundation fellowship in Great Britain and Guatemala and worked as a newspaper reporter in Telluride, Colorado for a number of years before becoming a freelance writer. In 1995, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by his alma mater.
He divides his time between Denver and Barcelona.