Fellowship / Fellows

Marcus Wicker

  • 2023–2024
  • Fiction & Poetry
  • Mary I. Bunting Institute Fellow
  • University of Memphis
Portrait of Marcus Wicker
Photo by Lou Jones

Marcus Wicker is a poet from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Memphis. He is the author of Silencer (Mariner Books, 2017)—winner of the Midland Authors Award and the Arnold Adoff Award for New Voices—and Maybe the Saddest Thing (Harper Perennial, 2012), selected by D. A. Powell for the National Poetry Series. Wicker’s work addresses the diverse experiences of Black Americans using hip hop, jazz, and the subversion of traditional poetic forms.

At Radcliffe, Wicker is completing “Dear Mothership,” a book of poetry that uses speculative narrative, empathy, and a hip hop aesthetic to explore reparations and examine the confounding ways humans treat one another when empowered by history and inheritance. He will also begin work on a book of lyric essays about barbershops, Black music, and belonging.

Wicker is the recipient of a Cave Canem Fellowship, a Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poetry Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Wicker’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, the Atlantic, the Kenyon Review, the Nation, the New Republic, the Oxford American, and Poetry. He earned his MFA from Indiana University.

Our 2023–2024 Fellows

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