Marc Anthony Richardson is a novelist and artist from Philadelphia, who specializes in visceral, poetic prose that circles on itself and leaps from present to past, using language that is, at times, lurid and phantasmagoric. Year of the Rat, his debut novel, won an American Book Award and the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize. Richardson was also the recipient of a PEN America grant, a Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright fellowship, and a Vermont Studio Center residency. Messiahs, his second novel, was a fiction finalist for the 2021 Big Other Book Award. Richardson’s work has appeared in Conjunctions, Callaloo, Black Warrior Review, Western Humanities Review, and the anthology, Who Will Speak for America?, from Temple University Press. He received his MFA from Mills College, taught at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and currently teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was the recipient of a Sachs Program Grant for Arts Innovation for his novel-in-progress, The Serpent Will Eat Whatever is in the Belly of the Beast. He was also the recipient a 2021 Creative Capital Award and a 2022 Mellon Scholar-in-Residence at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa.

Website: www.marcanthonyrichardson.com

Twitter Username: @MarcAnthonyRic2

Publications

• Messiahs , FC2/University of Alabama Press (August 23, 2021)
• Year of the Rat , FC2/University of Alabama Press (September 27, 2016)

Awards

• Andrew W. Mellon Scholar-in residence at Rhodes University (2022)
• Sachs Program Grant for Arts Innovation (2021)
• Creative Capital Award (2021)
• American Book Award (2017)
• Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize (2015)

Employment

• Lecturer at University of Pennsylvania (September 2019 - )
• Lecturer at Rutgers University (January 2019 - December 2019)

Degrees

• Master of Fine Arts in English and Creative Writing from Mills College (January 2009)
• Bachelor of Fine Arts in Literature and Social Services from Antioch College (May 1995)

Genres of Interest

Fiction, Creative nonfiction, Poetry