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Martin Pousson

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Martin Pousson
BornApril 13, 1966
Crowley, Louisiana, USA
OccupationNovelist, Poet, Professor
NationalityAmerican
GenreFiction, Poetry
Literary movementSouthern literature, Cajun literature, Gay and Lesbian literature

Martin Pousson (born April 13, 1966) is an American novelist, poet, and professor.

He was born and raised in Louisiana, in the Cajun French bayou land of Acadiana. Some of his favorite writers include Carson McCullers, Truman Capote and James Baldwin, as well as Denis Johnson and Junot Diaz.

His first novel, No Place, Louisiana (2002), was published by Riverhead Books, and it told the story of a Cajun family and an American dream gone wrong. The novel won acclaim from Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Cunningham and the Los Angeles Times, and it was a finalist for the John Gardner Book Award in Fiction.[1]

His first collection of poetry, Sugar (2005), was published by Suspect Thoughts Press, and it centered on the lives of outsiders, especially Cajuns, Southerners and gay men. Some of the poems also dealt with racism and the AIDS epidemic. The collection was praised by Alfred Corn and Jake Shears, and it was named a finalist for the 2006 Lambda Literary Awards for Poetry. He says that this collection would not have ever been published if it were not for a friend's saved copy of the manuscript. In 2005, he was named one of the Leading Men of the Year by Instinct magazine, alongside Jake Shears, Robert Gant, and Keith Boykin.

His stories, essays, and poems have appeared in The Antioch Review, Five Points , Epoch, StoryQuarterly, The Rattling Wall, Parnassus, ISLE: Oxford Journals, Icon, Chaparral, Verse Daily, Intersection, Love, Bourbon Street, The Louisiana Review, New Orleans Review, and Cimarron Review.

He has taught at Columbia University in New York City, at Rutgers University in New Jersey and at Loyola University New Orleans.[2] He is currently a Professor of English at California State University, Northridge,[3] in Los Angeles. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program and the Queer Studies Program, and some of his most popular courses include Narrative Writing, Advanced Narrative Writing, Theories of Fiction, and Gay Male Writers.

He was named a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts in Creative Writing for 2014. The NEA grant was awarded through the federal Art Works program for a collection of short stories in development titled "Black Sheep Boy." The stories are in the school of fabulism and are about a homosexual boy coming of age sexually in the bayous of Louisiana, in an area called "cancer alley" with high cluster rates of cancer near oil industrial sites. The stories also are about mental illness and werewolf myths.

References

  1. ^ "Martin Pousson". Verse Daily. Retrieved 2014-06-29.
  2. ^ [1] Archived May 28, 2010, at the Wayback Machine
  3. ^ "Department of English". Csun.edu. Retrieved 2014-06-29.
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