2024 UofM Alumni Association Distinguished Research Award

The Alumni Association may make up to five awards annually to faculty who have brought honor and recognition to the University through their research or creative activities. Candidates must have been employed full-time by the University of Memphis for at least five academic years prior to the semester of their application or nomination.

Marcus Wicker, associate professor of English, First Horizons Foundation Distinguished Professor and MFA program coordinator

Professor Marcus Wicker is a First Horizons Foundation Distinguished Associate Professor in the Department of English and program coordinator of the MFA in Creative Writing. He is the author of Silencer (Ecco, 2017)—winner of the Society of Midland Authors Award—and Maybe the Saddest Thing (Harper Perennial/Ecco, 2012), selected by D.A. Powell for the National Poetry Series. Both collections were finalists for the NAACP Image Award. During the 2023/2024 academic year, he was named a Mary I. Bunting Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies—one of the world’s leading centers for interdisciplinary exploration. The institute accepted just 3.3% of more than 1,600 mid and senior career applicants. Wicker’s honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship (2.19% of 1,600 applicants selected), the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poetry Award, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a long-term residential fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown (1.82% of 1,100 applicants selected). He has been the 2023 College of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Research Award, and in 2022, a Summer Research Stimulus.

Wicker’s poems have appeared in numerous literary and commercial publications including The Nation, The Atlantic, Poetry Magazine, Oxford American, The New Republic, and on PBS NewsHour. He is completing work on his third collection of poetry, Dear Mothership. The book examines the relationship between technology, inheritance, and civility through the lenses of hip hop, science fiction, and personal narrative while searching for joy on the other side of loss.