Fiction
Michael Martone
Michael Martone’s book, The Complete Writings of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone will be published by BOA Editions Ltd., in October of 2020. His newest book, Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana, will be published in September of 2022 by Baobab Press.
Recent books are The Moon Over Wapakoneta; Brooding; Memoranda; Winesburg, Indiana; Four for a Quarter; Not Normal, Illinois: Peculiar Fiction from the Flyover; Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins, a collection of essays; and Double-wide, his collected early stories.
He is also the author of The Blue Guide to Indiana. The University of Georgia Press published his book of essays, The Flatness and Other Landscapes, winner of the AWP Award for Nonfiction, in 2000.
Martone was born and grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He attended Butler University and graduated from Indiana University. He holds the MA from The Writing Seminars of The Johns Hopkins University.
Martone has won two Fellowships from the NEA and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. His stories have won awards in the Italian Americana fiction contest, the Florida Review Short Story Contest, the Story magazine Short, Short Story Contest, the Margaret Jones Fiction Prize of Black Ice Magazine, and the first World’s Best Short, Short Story Contest. His stories and essays have appeared and been cited in the Pushcart Prize, The Best American Stories and The Best American Essays anthologies. In 2013 he received the national Indiana Authors Award, and in 2016, the Mark Twain Award for Distinguished Contribution to Midwestern Literature from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature.
Michael Martone is recently retired as a Professor at the University of Alabama where he had been teaching since 1996. He has taught creative writing classes for 40 years. He has been a faculty member of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College since 1988. He also taught at Iowa State University, Harvard University, and Syracuse University.
2024 Fiction Shortlist: Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana
A scrapbook of over 100 sketches voiced by the residents of Winesburg, Indiana, (a small town attached to the Old Lincoln Highway between Fort Wayne and South Bend) addressing their secret delights, desires, and dreads.
2022 Fiction Shortlist: The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne
Inspired by the real-life pioneer of early aviation who invented the art of skywriting, this collection of stories forms a Midwestern mythology that celebrates facts, fiction, and the impermanence of art.
2020 Fiction Shortlist: The Moon Over Wapakoneta: Fictions and Science Fictions from Indiana and Beyond
The Moon over Wapakoneta is vintage Michael Martone, the visionary oracle of the American Midwest with the gift for discovering the marvelous in the mundane. In these stories Martone shows us how traveling across time zones from Ohio to Indiana is a form of time travel; how a beer bottle can serve as a kind of telescope, how Amish might power their spaceships with windmills as they travel through space and time. These stories capture the paradox of feeling that one is in the heart of the country while at the same time in the middle of nowhere, of natives who find themselves strangers in their once familiar, but now strange, lands.
On display is a love of obsolete technologies, small-town whimsy, home movies of proms and birthday parties, steam engines and baseball games. If Italo Calvino lived in Indiana rather than Italy, these are the fictions he might have made.
2013 National Winner
