Born in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, Richardson was raised in the West Oak Lane section of Philadelphia. In 1991, he graduated from the Philadelphia High School for the Creative and Performing Arts, and went on to earn his BFA from Antioch College and his MFA from Mills College. Prior to Mills, he worked as a visual artist and a nude model, and briefly studied figure drawing, draftsmanship, painting, and printmaking at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts on a partial scholarship, but returned to writing when lack of funding and a creative shift lead him to. Year of the Rat, his debut novel, won the 2015 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize. In 2017, it was awarded an American Book Award. On being included with other winners, Richardson wrote, “To win a writer’s award from award-winning writers is a chance to be in bed with as many human beings as humanly possible. The ceremony took place at the San Francisco Jazz Center, and was televised on C-SPAN. Year of the Rat, a Künstlerroman, draws heavily from his personal experiences, as well as from those of his family members, past and present, delving into philosophical rants, poetry, social satire, and ribald, phantasmagoric language. Over the course of a decade, many of the incidents written in the book were freshly experienced by the author, such as the death of his father and his own near-death account. Initially, one reviewer wrote that "the book is certainly unique in voice and style, but it’s also frightening, ugly, dense, and borderline offensive...it will make all but the most experimental of readers throw it across a room." Messiahs, his second novel, is scheduled for publication in fall 2021. In Messiahs, in a Kafkaesque America, one can assume a relative's capital sentence for holy reform, the proxy initiative, patterned after the Passion. He is a recipient of a PEN America grant, a Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright fellowship, a Vermont Studio Center residency, a writer-in-residency at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, and was a finalist for the MacDowell Colony and the Headland Center for the Arts. His work has appeared in Conjunctions, Callaloo, and the Anthology, Who Will Speak for America? from Temple University Press. Currently, he teaches at Rutgers University and the University of Pennsylvania.
