Background

Morgan Parker was born in 1988 in Southern California, United States.

Education

At the age of three, Morgan began attending a Christian school. She then attended a school in New York. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in anthropology and creative writing from Columbia University and her Master of Fine Arts degree in poetry from New York University.

Career

Morgan Parker is a poet, essayist, and novelist. Her poetry and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Tin House, The Paris Review, and others. She is currently an editor at Little A and Day One. She is creator and host of the live talk show Reparations, Live! at the Ace Hotel. She co-curates the Poets With Attitude (PWA) reading series with Tommy Pico. With Angel Nafis, she is The Other Black Girl Collective. Parker has taught creative writing at Columbia University as well. In December 2015, she was Poetry Foundation's featured blogger.

Parker is the author of the poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night (2015), There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé (2017), and most recent Magical Negro (2019). Magical Negro covers the insides, outsides, and in-betweens of Blackness, sparking conversation about very specific and personal experiences that illuminate the intersections of Blackness and femininity. Parker captures the braided thoughts of Black identity that are deeply entrenched in American culture, yet somehow considered others. Along the way, she weaves in history, Bible references, and internal Black dialogue, with wordy titles like, “Two White Girls in the African Braid Shop on Marcy and Fulton” and “We Are the House That Holds the Table at Which Yes We Will Happily Take a Goddamn Seat.”

Her debut young adult novel Who Put This Song On? was published in September 2019. This novel is about a black teenage girl searching for her identity when the world around her views her depression as a lack of faith and blackness as something to be politely ignored. It is based on her own teenage life and diaries. Her debut book of nonfiction will be released in 2020.

Achievements

• Parker is a winner of 2013 Gatewood Prize, 2016 Pushcart Prize, the recipient of a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and a Cave Canem graduate fellow. She has been hailed by The New York Times as “a dynamic craftsperson” of “considerable consequence to American poetry.”

Works

More photos

• book

  • Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night

    (Morgan Parker’s collection is hyper-contemporary, drawing...)

    2015
  • There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce

    (The only thing more beautiful than Beyoncé is God, and Go...)

    2017
  • Magical Negro

    (Magical Negro is an archive of black everydayness, a cata...)

    2019
  • Who Put This Song On?

    (Trapped in sunny, stifling, small-town suburbia, seventee...)

    2019

Views

Morgan Parker thinks that titles are very important, and she has so much fun with titles. She thinks they should be fun. It’s important for her as she’s writing, and for readers, that the title not to be simple.

The number one thing for her in writing is to entertain, challenge, scare, and push herself.

Quotations: "I feel more freedom in poetry than I do in any other genre. I think that’s because poems can traverse time and space in such a seamless way. You can kind of jump from one room to another, one era to another, one voice to another."

"You are beautiful because you’re funny. You are alive because you’re a question."

"I am a dreamer with empty hands and I like the chill."

"We Don’t Know When We Were Opened (Or, The Origin of the Universe)."

Connections

Morgan Parker is married.