Marc Anthony Richardson is an artist and novelist from Philadelphia. Year of the Rat, his autobiographical novel, won an American Book Award and a Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize. Messiahs, a speculative novel, was a fiction finalist for the Big Other Book Award. His forthcoming novel poem, The Serpent Will Eat Whatever is in the Belly of the Beast (Dalkey Archive Press), won a 2021 Creative Capital Award, a Sachs Program Grant, and most recently a 2024 fellowship from Brown University's Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. He also received a PEN America grant, a Hurston/Wright Foundation fellowship, and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, Art Omi, and Rhodes University in South Africa. His work has appeared in Conjunctions, Callaloo, Black Warrior Review, Western Humanities Review, 580 Split, and the anthology, Who Will Speak for America? from Temple University Press. He received his MFA from Mills College, taught at Rutgers University, and currently teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.