Contributors

Marc Anthony Richardson
Contributor History

Biography
Marc Anthony Richardson
An artist and novelist from Philadelphia, Marc Anthony Richardson won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize and an American Book Award for his debut novel, Year of the Rat (Fiction Collective Two, 2016). Richardson is also the recipient of a PEN America grant, a Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright fellowship, and a 2021 Creative Capital award. He teaches creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania and in 2021 will be a writer-in-residence at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. “Night Is the Best Counsel” is an excerpt from his upcoming novel, Messiahs (Fiction Collective Two, 2021).

Connect

e-mail
Submissions

In Print

Vol. 80
Ways of Water
Spring 2023
Edited by Bradford Morrow

Online

September 20, 2023
The Rachel stands tuned  
            to multiplicities, 
aslant in a territory of longing,
            where she becomes foreign.

            What has she found?
She listens, acknowledges another sound,
            diffuse, multiple,  
pulsing thought, oscillations, whisperings,
            never only one.
September 13, 2023
I had yet to discover the source of that star, it came and it passed but from where it sprang and then fell to fading remained a mystery. In cycling its light lent its powers to coloring my tablecloth a lighter shade, relieving pigment from its duty to darken, except for those spots where I placed my bottles and cups, shielding only parts of the piece from fading, threads left closer to their original hues hewed to others abandoned as wraiths to their fates, a darker ring the mark of those who stayed behind.
September 6, 2023
Where the trees blackened, I saw,

Quickly, three deer lean into goldenness.

It seems, although wildfires rage

Out of control, this world remembers

Some portion of its first purposes:

Superfluous beauty