Marc Anthony Richardson

Born in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, Richardson was raised in the West Oak Lane section of Philadelphia. 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 was a finalist for the 1994 Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers)[1] and his MFA from Mills College (where he was a nominee for Best New American Voice 2010).

Prior to Mills, he worked as a visual artist and a nude model, and briefly studied figure drawing, draftsmanship, painting, and printmaking at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts on a partial scholarship, but returned to writing when lack of funding and a creative shift lead him to. 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 the death of his father and his own near-death account. 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, his second novel, is scheduled for fall 2021 publication. In Messiahs, in Kafkaesque America, one can assume a relative's capital sentence for holy reform––the proxy initiative, patterned after the Passion.

He is also a recipient of a PEN America grant, a Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright fellowship, a Vermont Studio Center residency, and a writer-in-residency at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. His work has appeared in Conjunctions, Callaloo, Western Humanities Review, and the Anthology, Who Will Speak for America? from Temple University Press. Currently, he teaches at the University of Pennsylvania,[6] and is a 2021 Creative Capital Awardee for his novel-in-progress, The Serpent Will Eat Whatever is in the Belly of the Beast.[7] Richardson stated, "This Creative Capital Award means so much because there seems to be three types of thinkers in this world: those who think inside a cell, those who think outside the cell, and those who simply think freely. This award supports the artists who work with no limitations in mind, no allegiances––whose diverse experiences require divergent formats." [8]

• 2021 Creative Capital Award
• 2017 Before Columbus Foundation/American Book Award
• 2015 Fiction Collective Two (FC2) Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize

• Year of the Rat (Fiction Collective Two/University of Alabama Press) 2016. ISBN 978-1573660570

• Official website
• C-SPAN: American Book Awards 2017
• Entropy Interview
• KDVS (90.3 FM) University of California, Davis
• WXPN (88.5 FM) University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
• Scriptorium Reading, Sacramento, CA
• Publishers Weekly review
• Kirkus review
• Cleaver Magazine review (noted in the National Book Critics Circle blog, Critical Mass)