Michael Martone (born August 22, 1955 in Fort Wayne, Indiana) is the author of nearly 30 books and chapbooks. He was a professor at the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama, where he taught from 1996 until his retirement in 2020. Martone has won two Fellowships from the NEA and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. His stories and essays have appeared and been cited in the Pushcart Prize, The Best American Stories and The Best American Essays anthologies. Biography Martone attended Butler University and graduated from Indiana University. He holds an MA from the Writing Seminars of Johns Hopkins University, where he studied under John Barth. He has been a faculty member of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and has taught at Iowa State University, Harvard University, Syracuse University and the University of Alabama. He lives in Tuscaloosa with his wife, the poet Theresa Pappas. The couple has two sons, both of whom are writers: Sam Martone and Nicholas V. Pappas. Aside from studying under and befriending John Barth, Martone also developed a close relationship with the writer Thomas Pynchon while the two lived together in Brooklyn. It was later on, while teaching at Syracuse in the early 1990s, that Martone befriended a young David Foster Wallace and introduced to him a number of influential works, most notably Lewis Hyde's The Gift. Career Martone's 2005 work, Michael Martone, is an investigation of form and autobiography. It was originally written as a series of contributor's notes for various publications. One of his central interests is the "false biography" and the often blurry boundary between fact and fiction. He also considers himself a "neo-regionalist." The permeable boundary between fact and fiction is reflected in books like his 2001 The Blue Guide to Indiana which, as a disclaimer on the cover makes clear, "is in no way affiliated with, endorsed by, or associated with the series of travel books titled Blue Guide," and "in no way factually depicts or accurately represents the State of Indiana." The disclaimer, Martone explains, was included after he received a cease and desist letter from the publisher of "the real Blue Guide." This letter in turn inspired the opening chapter of Martone's 2015 anthology, Winesburg, Indiana, written in the form of a cease and desist letter from the fictional town of Winesburgcreated by the novelist Sherwood Andersonwhich claims proprietary