BIO

Marc Anthony Richardson is an artist and novelist from Philadelphia, who specializes in visceral, avant-garde fiction. Year of the Rat, his autobiographical novel, won an American Book Award and a Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize. Messiahs, a speculative novel, was a fiction finalist for the Big Other Book Award. The Serpent Will Eat Whatever is in the Belly of the Beast, a novelistic poem, is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press. Richardson also received an award from Creative Capital, grants from PEN America and the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, a Hurston/Wright Foundation fellowship, and residencies from Art Omi and the Vermont Studio Center. His work has appeared in Conjunctions, Callaloo, Black Warrior Review, Western Humanities Review, 580 Split, and the anthology, Who Will Speak for America? He received his BFA from Antioch College, his MFA from Mills College at Northeastern University, taught at Rutgers University, and currently teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, connecting innovative writing with yoga and rhythmic movement. Recently, he was an Andrew W. Mellon Scholar-in-Residence at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, and will be an Artistic Practitioner Fellow at Brown University's Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America in 2024.