He was raised in Warner Robins, Georgia and moved to New York City in 1998. Beginning as a performance poet and dramatist, Martin then moved to the novel form, and he has concentrated most of his creative energies here since his first full-length prose work Outline of My Lover.

Martin holds a BA from the University of Georgia, an MFA from The New School, and a Ph.D. in English from the CUNY Graduate Center. His doctoral dissertation, which dealt with the work of post-modern writer Kathy Acker, was awarded The Irving Howe Prize for Best Dissertation Involving Politics and Literature in 2007. He teaches at The New School University and in the MFA Program at Goddard College.

Outline of My Lover was selected as an International Book of the Year in The Times Literary Supplement by Colm Toibin and adapted in part by The Forsythe Company, along with "Irony Is Not Enough: Essay On My Life As Catherine Deneuve (2nd draft)" by Anne Carson, for the multimedia production "Kammer/Kammer".

Martin's work since Outline of My Lover includes Branwell, a novel based on the life of Branwell Brontë, and They Change The Subject, a collection of stories.[1] The Haiku Year was co-authored with Michael Stipe, Tom Gilroy, Grant Lee Phillips, and others. A volume of poetry, In the Time of Assignments was published by Soft Skull Press in 2008. This work was followed by an experimental narrative, Your Body Figured (Nightboat books),[2] which deals with aspects of the lives of the artists Balthus, Francis Bacon and his muse and model George Dyer, and the poet Hart Crane. In 2009, Martin published a third novel, Once You Go Back[3].

Martin's writing remains a hybrid of sorts, variously informed by the work of Colette, Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, Herve Guibert, Peter Handke, Michel Leiris, and Amelie Nothomb. He has written critically and lyrically on aspects of Virginia Woolf, The Lost Boys, Sylvia Plath, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Arundhati Roy, pornography, Silvan Tomkins and Melanie Klein. His writing exhibits traits of both "New Narrative" writing and New York School poetry.