Marc Anthony Richardson
Philadelphia, PA
Marc Anthony Richardson is an artist and novelist from Philadelphia, who specializes in visceral, 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 grants from PEN America and the Sachs Program, a fellowship from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, 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 South Africa.
From the Journal
- Ten Summer Books for the Radical Reader August 17, 2022
Cover for The Serpent Will Eat Whatever is in the Belly of the Beast, forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press.
Cover of Marc Anthony Richardson’s novel, Messiahs, featuring a photo of a painting by Jr Korpa. Published by FC2/University of Alabama Press, 2021.
Cover of Marc Anthony Richardson’s novel, Year of the Rat, featuring a photo of a painting by Hollis Heichemer. Published by FC2/University of Alabama Press, 2016.
The Serpent Will Eat Whatever is in the Belly of the Beast
Marc Anthony Richardson is an artist and novelist from Philadelphia, who specializes in dense, visceral prose that circles on itself and leaps from present to past, using language that is, at times, phantasmagoric.
Artist BioIn The Serpent Will Eat Whatever is in the Belly of the Beast, seven dissidents, victims of police violence, orchestrate a strange and insidious agenda, as pangs of conscience compel one of them to see beyond the self. The book is a novelistic poem, a mystical allegory, and a theatrical caché of character studies told in the second person by the collective conscience via the deceased, bleeding into each other and interspersed by the voices and the thoughts of each actor: you.