Marc Anthony Richardson | |
|---|---|
 Richardson in 2020 | |
| Born | December 7, 1972 Elkins Park, Pennsylvania |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Alma mater | Antioch College, Mills College |
| Genre | Literary fiction and poetry |
| Notable awards | American Book Award, Creative Capital Award |
| Website | |
| marcanthonyrichardson | |
Marc Anthony Richardson (born December 7, 1972) is an American novelist and artist. He won an American Book Award and a Creative Capital Award.
Born in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, Richardson was raised in the West Oak Lane section of Philadelphia by his mother, Betty Jean Richardson (née Williams), and his father, Malcolm Anthony Richardson. He is the youngest of their three sons. At 16, his parents separated and his mother and he moved out of their family home. In 1991, he graduated from the Philadelphia High School for the Creative and Performing Arts (where he won awards for illustration), and went on to earn his BFA from Antioch College (where he studied with Martia Golden and was a finalist for the 1994 Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers). [1] He earnd his MFA from Mills College (where he studied with Micheline Aharonian Marcom and was a nominee for Best New American Voice 2010).
For over two decades, Richardson worked as a direct-care, social service counselor in day schools and group homes for children in the Bay Area, group homes for adults in New York City, and public schools in Philadelphia. Prior to Mills, he worked as a visual artist and a nude model. Though an exceptional freestyle dancer, he focused on art. He briefly studied drawing, painting, and printmaking at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts on a partial scholarship, but returned to writing because of a lack of funding.
Year of the Rat, his debut novel, won the 2015 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize. [2] In 2017, it was awarded an American Book Award [3] from the Before Columbus Foundation, founded by Ishmael Reed. On being included with other winners, Richardson wrote, “To win a writer’s award from award-winning writers is a chance to be in bed with as many human beings as humanly possible." [4] The ceremony took place at the San Francisco Jazz Center and was televised on C-SPAN.
Year of the Rat, a Künstlerroman, draws heavily from his personal experiences, as well as from those of his family members, past and present, delving into philosophical rants, poetry, social satire, and ribald, phantasmagoric language. Over the course of a decade, many of the incidents written in the book were freshly experienced by the author, such as his father's death and the near-death accounts of his mother and himself. Initially, one reviewer wrote that "the book is certainly unique in voice and style, but it’s also frightening, ugly, dense, and borderline offensive...it will make all but the most experimental of readers throw it across a room." [5]
Messiahs, a speculative novel, fixes on an anonymous couple, an Asian American woman and an African American man. The man volunteered imprisonment on behalf of his wrongfully convicted nephew, yet―after over two years on death row―was "exonerated". In this dystopian society, proxies are allowed on death row in place of their convicted kin, as acts of holy reform. The initiative is based on the Passion of Christ. [6] [7] Messiahs was nominated as a fiction finalist for the 2021 Big Other Book Award. [8]
Richardson was also a recipient of a PEN America grant, a Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright fellowship, an Art Omi [9] residency, a Vermont Studio Center residency, and was an Andrew W. Mellon Scholar-in-residence at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. His 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 taught at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, and currently teaches at the University of Pennsylvania College of Arts & Sciences. [10] In 2021, he received a Creative Capital Award and a Sachs Program Grant for Arts Innovation for his work-in-progress, The Serpent Will Eat Whatever Is in the Belly of the Beast. [11] [12] Concerning the Creative Capital Award, Richardson stated: "This award supports the artists who work with no limitations in mind, no allegiances―whose diverse experiences require divergent formats." [13] In 2024, he received an Artist Practitioner Fellowship from the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA) at Brown University. [14]
Zora Neale Hurston was an American author, anthropologist, and documentary filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-20th-century American South and published research on hoodoo and Caribbean Vodou. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She also wrote over 50 short stories, plays, and essays.
Patrick Lane was a Canadian poet. He had written in several other genres, including essays, short stories, and was the author of the novel Red Dog, Red Dog.
Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead is an American novelist. He is the author of nine novels, including his 1999 debut The Intuitionist; The Underground Railroad (2016), for which he won the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; and The Nickel Boys, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction again in 2020, making him one of only four writers ever to win the prize twice. He has also published two books of nonfiction. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.
Michael Martone is an American author. Since 1977, he has written nearly 30 books and chapbooks. He was a professor at the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama, where he taught from 1996 until his retirement in 2020.
Ronald Sukenick was an American writer and literary theorist.
Michelle Richmond is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. She wrote The Year of Fog, which was a New York Times bestseller,The Marriage Pact, which was a Sunday Times bestseller, and six other books of fiction.
Fiction Collective Two (FC2) is an author-run, not-for-profit publisher of avant-garde, experimental fiction supported in part by the University of Utah, the University of Alabama Press, Central Michigan University, Illinois State University, private contributors, arts organizations and foundations, and contest fees.
Percival Everett is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
Laila Lalami is a Moroccan-American novelist, essayist, and professor. After earning her licence ès lettres degree in Morocco, she received a fellowship to study in the United Kingdom (UK), where she earned an MA in linguistics.
Jennifer Natalya Fink is an American author working in experimental feminist and queer fiction. She is best known for her novels Burn, V, and The Mikvah Queen, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. Her novel, Bhopal Dance (2018), won the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize in 2017.
Valerie Boyd was an American writer and academic. She was best known for her biography of Zora Neale Hurston entitled Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. She was an associate professor and the Charlayne Hunter-Gault Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia, where she taught narrative nonfiction writing, as well as arts and literary journalism.
Nelly Rosario is a Dominican-American novelist and creative writing instructor in the Latina/o Studies Program at Williams College. She was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, NY. She earned an SB in civil/environmental engineering from MIT and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. She has taught in the Undergraduate Creative Writing Program at Columbia University, the MFA Program at Texas State University, and was a visiting scholar in the Comparative Media/Writing Program at MIT. Her fiction and creative nonfiction work has appeared in various anthologies and journals.
Aimee Parkison is an American writer known for experimental, lyrical, feminist fiction. She has won the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize as well as the first annual Starcherone Fiction Prize and has taught creative writing at a number of universities, including Cornell University, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Oklahoma State University.
Jonathan Baumbach was an American author, academic and film critic.
Mitchell S. Jackson is an American writer. He is the author of the 2013 novel The Residue Years, as well as Oversoul (2012), an ebook collection of essays and short stories. Jackson is a Whiting Award recipient and a former winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. In 2021, while an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Chicago, he won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing for his profile of Ahmaud Arbery for Runner's World. As of 2021, Jackson is the John O. Whiteman Dean's Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University.
Bernice L. McFadden is an American novelist. She has also written humorous erotica under the pseudonym Geneva Holliday. Author of fifteen novels, she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Tulane University in New Orleans.
American Book Review is a literary journal operating out of the University of Houston-Victoria. Their mission statement is to "specialize in reviews of frequently neglected published works of fiction, poetry, and literary and cultural criticism from small, regional, university, ethnic, avant-garde, and women's presses."
Vi Khi Nao is a cross-genre writer from Long Khánh, Vietnam. She is a graduate of the MFA program at Brown University, where she received the John Hawkes Prize, the Feldman Prize and the Kim Ann Arstark Memorial Award. She was the 2022 recipient of Lambda Literary's Jim Duggins, PhD Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize.
Jamel Brinkley is an American writer. His debut story collection, A Lucky Man (2018), was the winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award, The Story Prize, the John Leonard Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. He currently teaches fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Nafissa Thompson-Spires is an African-American writer. Her first book, Heads of the Colored People, won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the PEN/Open Book Award, and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for fiction.