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) 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 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. In 2017, it was awarded the American Book Award.

Year of the Rat, a tragicomedy, 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 incidences written in the book were freshly experienced by the author, such as the death of his father and his own near-death account.

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.

• 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