Douglas A. Martin was born in Virginia and raised in Georgia. He earned a BA in English from the University of Georgia, an MFA in creative writing from the New School, and a PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center.

Martin is the author of the poetry collections My Gradual Demise & Honeysuckle (1994) and Servicing the Salamander (1998) and co-author of The Haiku Year (1998)—a project that required him to compose a haiku a day. He has also published a collection of short stories, They Change the Subject (2005), and a trilogy of prose pieces, Your Body Figured (2008). His novels include Outline of My Lover (2000), named an International Book of the Year in The Times Literary Supplement and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award; Branwell: A Novel of the Brontë Brother (2006); Once You Go Back (2009); Acker (2019), and Wolf (2020).