Biography
Marco Verdoni (he/him) is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. Born and raised in Saginaw, Michigan, he holds an MFA from the New Writers Project at the University of Texas at Austin and is a Fulbright scholar. He was a finalist for the 2025 Miami Book Fair Emerging Writer Fellowship.
His essay “When to Tell Someone You Went to Prison” won the 2019 Steinberg Essay Prize and received an honorable mention in The Best American Essays. Written while he was still incarcerated, his short story “Immigrant Song” was selected by Joyce Carol Oates for inclusion in Akashic Books’ anthology Prison Noir. Having recently completed his memoir about his decade growing up behind bars, Verdoni is now living abroad and working on his first novel.
