Background

Ethnicity: Rion Amilcar Scott's parents are immigrants from the island Trinidad in the Caribbean.

Rion Amilcar Scott was born in Silver Spring, Maryland, United States. He has two older brothers.

Education

When Rion Amilcar Scott was nine years old, he wrote his first poem. It was about gun violence in his hometown. He used a lot of alliteration and onomatopoeia. He eventually abandoned writing after his teacher told him that he writes like a traveler who has no idea what to include in the luggage. He was reborn years later as a non-fiction writer. In junior high school, Scott wrote a poem called The Colors of America. It was three lines based on the idea that if you look at the American flag a certain way, you see the brutality of the nation’s founding. When he was in his early teens, he wrote a lot about racial oppression and other complex political ideas he only half understood. He read, almost exclusively, Black Arts Movement poetry and listened to Public Enemy and Brand Nubian.

Rion holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Howard University. In 2008 he received a Master of Fine Arts degree from George Mason University.

Career

At the beginning of his career, Rion Amilcar Scott has contributed to The Kenyon Review, Crab Orchard Review, PANK, The Rumpus, Fiction International and Confrontation. He is the author of the collection, Wolf Tickets, and a short story collection, People in Motion. Then he left journalism.

Rion Amilcar Scott's debut collection of short stories, Insurrections, was published in August 2016. It is set in Cross River, Maryland, a fictional town that acts as the backdrop for his narratives about African American life. The town was founded after a successful slave uprising in the early 1800s. While the location is important to these stories, it mainly functions as a setting.

With his new collection, The World Doesn’t Require You (2019), Scott has delved into the viscera of Cross River, exploring its passions and darkest secrets. These 11 genre-spanning stories, plus an intricate novella, take more risks both stylistically and thematically, revealing the Riverbabies' distinctive dialects, demons, myths, and dreams. In this collection, Rion Amilcar Scott explores religion, violence, and love while shattering genre lines.

He also teaches English at Bowie State University in Bowie, Maryland.

Achievements

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  Rion Amilcar Scott received the 2017 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the 2017 Hillsdale Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers for his short story collection Insurrections. At George Mason University, he won both the Mary Roberts Rinehart award and a Completion Fellowship. His honors also include a Kimbilio Fellowship. His story earned a place on the Wigleaf Top 50 Fictions of 2016 and 2013 lists, and one of his essays was listed as a notable in Best American Essays 2015.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The World Doesn't Require You: Stories

    (Established by the leaders of the country’s only successf...)

    2019
  • Insurrections: Stories

    (A suicidal father looks to an older neighbor - and the Co...)

    2016

Views

Rion Amilcar Scott has always felt that writing toward one’s obsessions is the only responsibility of a writer. It's important to him that his sentences work on a rhythmic level. And he pays close attention to sensory details.

August Wilson has always been the one who influenced Rion Amilcar Scott, and he will forever follow his lead.

Quotations: "I try to write about blackness the way I and - I think - most black people, experience it. Blackness for me is sort of like air, I’m constantly perceiving it, but not really thinking about it as my mind is on more immediate concerns. And then sometimes I’m forced into a hyper-awareness of it and that awareness is at times pleasant, at times noxious."

"We are all shaped by historic and societal forces we don’t necessarily always fully understand or have access to, and at the same time, we are often completely disconnected from history and society, just plowing forth, trying to survive."

"It’s very complicated and interesting to look at someone you’re related to and dig into that relationship. I look at my father and a lot of times I think of him as a great man. I want to follow him and be as good as him."

Personality

Rion Amilcar Scott is a big Kendrick Lamar fan.

His favorite use for Twitter is as a humor writing exercise. Twitter both helps and hinders his writing. For him, tweeting is a good way to practice concision as a writer, but at the same time, he follows a lot of news organizations and literary journals and could spend all day clicking on poems, news articles, short stories and the like.

Quotes from others about the person

• "Scott is a writer that earns a reader's trust and willingness to go wherever his stories lead." - Michael Janairo
  
  "I think this man is a national treasure of a writer. What brilliance between the pages." - Jacqueline Woodson
  
  "Rion Amilcar Scott doesn’t hold back or tiptoe around issues about race. He’s the most courageous writer I know." - Nicole Dennis-Benn

Connections

Rion Amilcar Scott is married. The couple has two sons.

Mother:

Monica Scott

Monica Scott passed away in 2019.