Marc Anthony Richardson is an artist and novelist from Philadelphia, who specializes in avant-garde fiction. 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. The Serpent Will Eat Whatever is in the Belly of the Beast, a novelistic poem, is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press. Richardson also received an award from Creative Capital, grants from PEN America and the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, a Hurston/Wright Foundation fellowship, and residencies from Art Omi and the Vermont Studio Center. His work has appeared in Conjunctions, Callaloo, Black Warrior Review, Western Humanities Review, 580 Split, and the anthology, Who Will Speak for America? He received his MFA from Mills College, taught at Rutgers, and currently teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. Recently, he was an Andrew W. Mellon Scholar-in-Residence at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa.