Mark Richard was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and grew up in Texas and Virginia. As heard on the Diane Rehm Show on National Public Radio: He grew up in the 1960s in a racially divided rural town in Virginia. He was born with deformed hips and spent years in and out of charity hospitals.
When his father walked out, his mother withdrew further into a world of faith.
Washington and Lee University.
He is the author of two award-winning short story collections, The Ice at the Bottom of the World and Charity, a bestselling novel, Fishboy, and House of Prayer Number. 2: A Writer"s Journey Home. His family was poor.
In a new memoir "House of Prayer Number.
2" he details growing up in the American South as a “The Special Child” and how the racial tensions and religious fervor of his home town animate his writing today. He attended college at Washington and Lee University.
His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, Gentlemen’s Quarterly, The Paris Review, The Oxford American, Grand Street, Shenandoah, The Quarterly, Equator, and Antaeus. He has been writer-in-residence at the University of California Irvine, University of Mississippi, Arizona State University, the University of the South, Sewanee, and The Writer’s Voice in New New York
His journalism has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, Spin, Esquire, George, Detour, Vogue, The Oxford American, and The Southern Review, and he has been a correspondent for the British Broadcasting Corporation. He was also screenwriter for the film Stop Loss.
His first book, the short story collection The Ice at the Bottom of the World, won the 1990 Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award. He is the recipient of the Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association/Ernest Hemingway Award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Whiting Award, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, the Mary Francis Hobson Medal for Arts and Letters, and a National Magazine Award for Fiction.
