Morgan Parker

Morgan Parker is an American poet and novelist whose work has been widely praised for its formal innovation, cultural criticism, and engagement with Black womanhood, celebrity, and grief. Born in San Bernardino, California, she holds an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University's School of the Arts. Her third poetry collection, Magical Negro (2019), won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and was hailed as a tour de force meditation on Blackness in America, drawing on pop culture, American history, and personal lyric. Her earlier collections, Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night (2015) and There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé (2017), established her as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary American poetry. Parker is also the author of the young adult novel Who Put This Song On? (2019), which draws on her own experiences with depression and identity as a Black teenager in predominantly white spaces. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Cosmic Writer's Residency, and the MacDowell Colony. She is co-founder of the literary collective Poets With Attitude (PWA) with poet Tommy Pico. Parker lives in Los Angeles, where she continues to write and perform.