Award-Winning Poet, Essayist, and Novelist
Morgan Parker’s visit is co-sponsored by The Hub on Black Affairs and Community Engagement.

Morgan Parker is a poet, essayist, and novelist. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and has been hailed by the New York Times as “a dynamic craftsperson” of “considerable consequence to American poetry.”

“Ignore Ms. Parker at your peril,” acclaimed poet Patricia Smith warns, and we second the sentiment. She is the author of the young adult novel Who Put This Song On?; and the poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and Magical Negro, which won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award. Her debut book of nonfiction, You Get What You Pay For, was published in 2024 and received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews. Saeed Jones calls it, “…the kind of book that saves lives,” and Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed, praises You Get What You Pay For as “an engrossing journey through Parker’s expansive and gifted mind.”

Morgan received her Bachelors in Anthropology and Creative Writing from Columbia University and her MFA in Poetry from NYU. Her work has appeared widely, in such publications as The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and Best American Poetry; a Broadway playbill; and two Common albums. Morgan is a Cave Canem graduate fellow, a WGA member, and a Sagittarius. She lives in Los Angeles with her dog Shirley.

THIS PERFORMANCE IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, NO TICKET IS REQUIRED.