Nate Marshall

Poet, Rapper, Educator & Editor
Hurston/Wright Founding Members Award

Readings &
Lecture Topics
  • The Sonnet & The Sixteen: Rap’s Relationship to the Poem
  • Gwendolyn Brooks: Bronzeville’s Bard
  • The Difficult Miracle: Black Poetry from Maafa to Movement
  • An Evening with Nate Marshall

Biography

“I am thankful for the honesty and self-examination in this work, yes. But even beyond that, I am thankful for a speaker who speaks as my people might, yelling across a parking lot or during a card game. I am thankful that this, too, is a part of the honesty this marvelous work is in pursuit of.”—Hanif Abdurraqib

“I hear Etheridge Knight, I hear Terrance Hayes, but most vividly, I hear Nate Marshall naming his many selves as some flee, others linger, and one in particular threatens to hunt him down. Don’t be fooled by the calm and assured clarity of this poet’s voice; there is a trip wire hidden in damn near every line break.” —Saeed Jones

Nate Marshall is a writer and educator from the South Side of Chicago. His forthcoming collection of poems, Something Blue (One World, 2026) has been called “singular, tender, sometimes laugh-out-loud hilarious and other times soul-unraveling” by Pulitzer Prize finalist Danez Smith. He is also the author of the collections Wild Hundreds (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and a finalist for the 2015 NAACP Image Award; and Finna (One World, 2020), which was named one of the best books of the year by NPR and The New York Public Library. A Cave Canem fellow, his poetry has appeared in Poetry, Indiana Review, The New Republic, and elsewhere.

In Finna Marshall serves sharp, lyrical poems celebrating the Black vernacular–its influence on pop culture, its necessity for familial survival, its rite in storytelling and in creating the safety found only within its intimacy. The project considers the brevity and disposability of Black lives in our current era of emboldened white supremacy, illuminating “life in this country in a strikingly original way” says The Washington Post.

Across his work, Marshall observes the presence of hometowns and origins, as well as their influence in how we inhabit language. Marshall work meditates on language as one of the key spaces we use to oppress or empower. Always paying particular attention to the ways that Black people in the West were first stripped of language and how those peoples have continued to remake language as a site of possibility.

Marshall is a coeditor of The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (Haymarket Books, 2015). He is also an accomplished rapper. Marshall is a founding member of the poetry collective Dark Noise. He was the star of the award-winning full-length documentary Louder Than a Bomb and was featured on the HBO original series Brave New Voices.

Marshall received the 2014 Hurston/Wright Founding Members Award for College Writers and the 2013 Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Award. In 2015, he was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.

Marshall is an associate professor in the creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin and lives in Madison, WI with his family.

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