Malachi Black

is the author of Indirect Light, recently published by Four Way Books, and Storm Toward Morning (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), a finalist for the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award and a selection for the Poetry Society of America's New American Poets Series (chosen by Ilya Kaminsky). Black is also the author of two limited-edition chapbooks: Quarantine (Argos Books, 2012) and Echolocation (Float Press, 2010). Black’s poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series, AGNI, The American Poetry Review, The Baffler, The Believer, Boston Review, Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Narrative, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry, among other journals, and in a number of anthologies, including Before the Door of God; Discoveries: New Writing from The Iowa Review; The Poet’s Quest for God; and A House Called Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Poetry. 

Black was born in Boston, Massachusetts and raised in Morris County, New Jersey. He holds a B.A. from New York University, an M.F.A. from the University of Texas at Austin's Michener Center for Writers, and a Ph.D. in English with a Creative Writing emphasis from the University of Utah. A 2024-25 Fulbright U.S. Scholar to Lithuania, Black has also been the recipient fellowships and awards from the Amy Clampitt House, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Emory University, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Hawthornden Castle, MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation (a 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellowship), the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Yaddo. Black was the subject of an Emerging Poet profile by Mark Jarman in American Poets: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, and his work has several times been set to music and has been featured in exhibitions both in the U.S. and abroad, including recent and forthcoming translations into French, Italian, Dutch, Croatian, and Lithuanian. Black is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of San Diego and lives in California.