Marcus Clayton is a multigenre biracial Black and Costa Rican writer from South Gate, CA, and a current part-time professor for various English and Ethnic studies departments within the California State University system. He has an MFA in Poetry from Cal State Long Beach and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. He has an inter-genre story collection titled ¡PÓNK! with Nightboat Books, a poetry chapbook called Nurture the Open Wounds with Glass Poetry Press, and is a 2026 finalist of the DAG Foundation Prize for Literature. Some work has appeared in the anthology Black Punk Now!, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Indiana Review, Passages North, and The Oxford Handbook of Punk Rock. Outside of the writing and teaching worlds, he moonlights as a guitarist and shouts for Los Angeles punk band, tudors., and spends a lot of time at home tolerating his hyperactive pug named Darby Crash.
