Marcus Wicker

Marcus Wicker is the author of Silencer (Mariner/Ecco, 2017)—winner of the Society of Midland Authors Award—and Maybe the Saddest Thing (Harper Perennial, 2012), selected by D.A. Powell for the National Poetry Series. A 2023 - 2024 Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellow, his honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poetry Award, and a Pushcart Prize. Wicker’s poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Oxford American, and Poetry Magazine. He is an Associate Professor at the University of Memphis, where he teaches in the MFA program.

Artist Statement

My poems are influenced by the vernacular, patterning, and improvisatory movement of Black music—OutKast, Roy Hargrove, Mom and Dad’s Curtis Mayfield and Frankie Beverly records. My book, Maybe the Saddest Thing, preserves and funnels those sounds through sonnets, epistles, and ghazals that trouble masculinity, identity, and belonging. Silencer, my second collection, addresses the police shootings of African Americans, wrestling with faith in the face of rampant injustice. The book’s central speaker is a Black man living in the Midwest who invites readers to feel the discomfort of being silent and silenced, experiencing daily microaggressions while watching an unavoidable loop of police brutality and gun deaths online. Stylistically, the book relies on hip hop sensibilities as an outlet for grief and resistance. Dear Mothership, the collection I’m working on now, poses the question: How does one continue loving the world despite years of impediment? I’ve been writing about inheritance and searching for joy on the other side of grief, exploring the lingering heartbreak of two miscarriages alongside elegies and odes for a suddenly departed friend. These poems modulate between blues and humor to make way for understanding and hope.