Marc Anthony Richardson

Marc Anthony Richardson (born December 7, 1972) is an American novelist and artist.

Marc Anthony Richardson
Richardson at Point Reyes
Born December 7, 1972
Elkins Park, Pennsylvania
Citizenship United States
Alma mater Antioch College, Mills College
Genre Literary fiction
Notable awards American Book Award
Website
marcanthonyrichardson.com

Life and work

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] 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, stream of consciousness, 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]

The recipient of a Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright fellowship and a Vermont Studio Center residency his major literary influences are: Dante Alighieri, William Faulkner, James Baldwin, Anne Sexton, Knut Hamsun, Henry Miller, Bruno Schulz, George Konrad, Marguerite Duras, Tadeusz Borowski, Renaldo Arenas, Italo Calvino, and Antonio Lobo Antunes.

Awards

Publications

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

References

  1. ↑ "Hurston/Wright Foundation | Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers Recipients". www.hurstonwright.org. Retrieved 2017-11-02.
  2. ↑ "FC2". www.fc2.org. Retrieved 2017-11-02.
  3. ↑ "American Book Awards | Before Columbus Foundation". www.beforecolumbusfoundation.com. Retrieved 2017-11-02.
  4. ↑ "YEAR OF THE RAT Named American Book Award Winner". The University of Alabama Press Blog. 2017-08-09. Retrieved 2017-11-02.
  5. ↑ YEAR OF THE RAT by Marc Anthony Richardson | Kirkus Reviews.
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