Marc Anthony Richardson is a novelist and artist from Philadelphia, who specializes in visceral, experimental, poetic prose that circles on itself and leaps from present to past, using language that is, at times, lurid and phantasmagoric. Year of the Rat, his debut novel, won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, and an American Book Award. Richardson was also the recipient of a PEN America grant, a Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright fellowship, and a Vermont Studio Center residency. Messiahs, his second novel, was released in Fall 2021 by Fiction Collective Two/University of Alabama Press. The book takes place in a dystopian America, where one can assume a relative’s capital sentence as an act of holy reform—the proxy initiative, patterned after the Passion. Richardson’s work has appeared in Conjunctions, Callaloo, Black Warrior Review, Western Humanities Review, and the anthology, Who Will Speak for America?, from Temple University Press. He received his MFA from Mills College, taught at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and currently teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is the recipient of a Sachs Program Grant for Arts Innovation for his novel-in-progress, The Serpent Will Eat Whatever is in the Belly of the Beast. He is the recipient of a 2021 Creative Capital Award and a 2022 Mellon Scholar-in-residence at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa.