Marcus Wicker was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. A 2011 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship recipient, he has also held fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Cave Canem, and Indiana University, where he received his MFA. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Beloit Poetry Journal, jubilat, Ninth Letter, and Crab Orchard Review, among other journals. He is assistant professor of English at University of Southern Indiana. (Author photo by Donald Adiska)
2011 National Poetry Series Selection
“These are wide-ranging Whitmanesque poems—self-aware meditations that rap and jazz their way forward, talk back, backtrack, and scratch so hard they blow out the speakers with their complicated love for a huge cast of icons, from Pam Grier to Flavor Flav, from RuPaul to Dave Chapelle.”
—Erika Meitner
“Marcus Wicker has, as Mos Def and Talib Kweli did, made an art that bridges cultures….The dialogues, love letters, and reflections throughout this wonderful debut show us what it is to be in vigilant conversation with the world and with the self.”
—Terrance Hayes
“Action painting meets the pop of hip-hop. Here is a dashing figure of speech and preach, a lovepoet to the stars....Marcus Wicker[’s] lyric wizardry astounds the ear in conclamant melodies and astonishes the eye ‘like a shard of glass catches a beam’.”
—D.A. Powell
Harper Perennial
