Martin Pousson

His second novel, Black Sheep Boy (2016), was published by Rare Bird Books. A PEN limited edition was released by Rare Bird in 2017, and a paperback edition followed in 2018. The novel-in-stories centers on a queer boy, the son of a mixed-race mother and a Cajun French father, set in the bayous of Louisiana. Some of the stories involve horror, fantasy, and magic realism, featuring werewolves, skinwalkers, and voodoo healers. A selection of those stories won a NEA Fellowship. Black Sheep Boy was praised by the Los Angeles Times, The Millions, and Lambda Literary, as well as by the writers Aimee Bender, Ben Loory, and Justin Torres. Stories from the novel were anthologized in Best Gay Stories 2017 and Best Gay Speculative Fiction 2017. Black Sheep Boy was featured on NPR: The Reading Life, as a Los Angeles Times Literary Pick, as a finalist for the On Top Down Under Book of the Year, and as a Book Riot Must-Read Indie Press Book. In 2017, Black Sheep Boy won the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction. In 2018, Black Sheep Boy was a shortlist finalist for the Simpson Family Literary Prize, founded by Joyce Carol Oates and UC Berkeley.

In 2014, he won a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing (Fiction).

His first collection of poetry, Sugar (2005), was published by Suspect Thoughts Press, and it centers on the lives of outsiders, especially Cajuns, Southerners and gay men. Some of the poems also deal 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 first novel, No Place, Louisiana (2002), was published by Riverhead Books, and it tells the story of a Cajun family, a troubled marriage, and an American dream gone wrong set in Louisiana's bayou country. The novel was praised by Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Cunningham and was acclaimed in reviews by The Advocate, Publishers Weekly, New York Daily News, The Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times. No Place, Louisiana was a finalist for the John Gardner Book Award in Fiction.

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