RM220 presents Michael Martone & Rodney Jones

RM220 will host Michael Martone and Rodney Jones at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, April 18, 2018, at Saturn Bar, 3067 St. Claude Ave. We will have free broadsides featuring words from Martone’s latest book, BROODING, designed and printed by Friedrich Kerksieck and Small Fires Press. Octavia Books will be on hand to sell copies of Brooding.

Michael Martone says, when asked for a biography:

If you go to my Wikipedia page (not something I’ve written but would have liked to have written), it mentions that my book Michael Martone “is an investigation of form and autobiography. …His literary forte is ‘false biographies’” That is true but not the whole story. I like that my former students and friends often “edit ” the entry, adding outlandish untrue things that the Wikipedia curators then attempt to purge, looking for accuracy. They miss a few things that then become part of the record like the dozen interviews of a Michael Martone by a Matthew Baker, neither of whom I know. I would have also said I have a keen interest in “place,” especially the places of Fort Wayne, Indiana, and the Midwest.

Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1955, educated in the public schools there. He attended Butler University and graduated from Indiana University in 1977. In 1979, he received an MA from The Johns Hopkins University. He has taught at Iowa State, Harvard, and Syracuse universities, and since 1996, the University of Alabama.

He has published fourteen books of fiction and nonfiction and edited or co-edited eight anthologies, most recently, Winesburg, Indiana, a hybrid collection of his own fiction and fiction contributed by a dozen other writers all set in the imaginary town of Martone’s invention. Brooding, essays, and The Moon Over Wapakoneta, speculative and science fictions, are both forthcoming in 2018. He lives in Tuscaloosa with the poet, Theresa Pappas.

Rodney Jones is the author of eleven books of poems. His many honors include the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Harper Lee Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award, and he has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize. He teaches in the low-residency MFA creative writing program at Warren Wilson College and lives in New Orleans and Southern Illinois.