Martin Pousson, (’93) has been awarded an NEA 2014 Creative Writing Fellowship in Prose. The honor, which includes a $25,000 grant, is in support of “Black Sheep Boy,” a collection of short stories that fall into the “fabulism” school of writing and chronicle the sexual coming-of-age of a young mixed-raced man in the bayous of Louisiana. Martin Pousson’s work, his first novel, No Place, Louisiana, and his poetry collection, Sugar, have been compared to acclaimed writers Dorothy Allison, Frank McCourt and Carson McCullers.

Pousson is an associate professor of English at California State University, Northridge. Elizabeth Say, Dean of CSUN’s College of Humanities, says she is proud to count Pousson among the members of her college’s faculty: “Not only is Professor Pousson a great writer, he is a beloved teacher and mentor, and an excellent citizen of this university.” Martin graduated from Loyola in 1993. After receiving an MFA degree in creative writing from Columbia, he returned to Loyola as a member of the English Department faculty, where post-Katrina he founded the 1718 Reading Series.