authorDiscover the Best Books Written by Morgan Parker
Morgan Parker is an American poet, novelist, and editor. She is the author of poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night (Switchback Books, 2015), There are More Beautiful Things than Beyoncé (Tin House Books, 2017), and Magical Negro (Tin House Books, 2019), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
She is also the author of the young adult novel, Who Put This Song On (Delacorte Press, 2019). Parker completed her bachelor's degree in anthropology and creative writing at Columbia University and her MFA in poetry at New York University.
Parker previously served as an editor at Amazon Publishing's Little A and Day One. She has taught creative writing at Columbia University, co-curates the Poets With Attitude (PWA) reading series with Tommy Pico, and is the creator and host of Reparations, Live! at the Ace Hotel in New York and is a member of The Other Black Girl Collective with poet and performer Angel Nafis.
Her poetry has been featured in publications including The Awl, Poetry Foundation, Tin House, and others. Her work was also included in Why I Am Not A Painter (Argos Books), The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, Black Girl Magic: The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2, and Best American Poetry 2016. In December 2015, she was Poetry Foundation's featured blogger.
Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night was Parker's debut collection, published in 2015, and was re-released in both the UK and the US in 2021. In an interview with the London Review Bookshop upon the book's rerelease, Parker discusses and reflects on her art with Rachel Long.
In this, they also discuss the importance of spoken word and humor, where Parker's boldness gives the poems a life beyond the page, weaving between humor and pathos and collapsing the distinction between the personal and political.
