Martínez, author of ¡Caramba! (2004), was born in San José, California, the only child of a first generation Mexican-American father, and an American mother of Germanic descent. A high school dropout with a college degree, she is a third-generation flea-marketeer. Some of her earliest and fondest memories are of accompanying her Mexican grandmother to sell at the flea market. The flea-market gene seemed to have skipped a generation, but Nina Marie was recently able to recapture the lost generation by setting her retired father up with a gig selling her auction rejects at a local flea market where he is known around town as “The Purse Guy” aka “El Señor de las Bolsas.” Selling mostly vintage and designer finds at flea markets and online for the last twenty years has provided some of the fodder for her forthcoming novel, Swap Meet, about a girl who visits the county dump her first full day of life (it was on the way home from the hospital), has a horrible childhood, then grows up to be the queen of the swap meet.
