The Puerto Rican Literature Project

Malcolm Friend was born in 1992 in Seattle, Washington and grew up in its Rainier Beach neighborhood. He received his BA from Vanderbilt University in 2014 and his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh in 2014. His awards include the 2014 Merrill Moore Prize for Poetry, the 2016 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, and the 2017 Hillary Gravendyk Award. His publications include mxd kd mixtape (Glass Poetry, 2017) and Our Bruises Kept Singing Purple (Inlandia Books, 2018), and he his work has appeared in literary magazines such as The Acentos Review, Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, Fjords Review's Black American Edition, and Pretty Owl Poetry, among others. He is the poetry editor of FreezeRay Poetry. Friend, along with his fellow poet, JR Mahung, form the Afro-Caribbean poetry collective, Black Plantains. He teaches in Austin, Texas and is the faculty sponsor of a student spoken-word organization.

Works Cited

Friend, Malcolm. Author Questionnaire. El proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña, 2024.

Friend, Malcolm. “Bio.” Malcolm Friend, MALCOLM FRIEND, 2020, 

www.malcolmfriend.com/bio. 

“Malcolm Friend.” Blackbird, 2022, vol. 21, no. 2,

https://blackbird-archive.vcu.edu/v21n2/poetry/friend-m/index.shtml.

“Poetry by Malcolm Friend.” Apogee Journal, Apogee Journal, 15 June 2017,

apogeejournal.org/2017/06/19/poetry-malcolm-friend/.