Nate Marshall

Nate Marshall is a poet, editor, rapper, and educator from the South Side of Chicago whose work places Black vernacular, neighborhood life, and hip hop poetics at the center of literary craft. Finna, his second poetry collection, takes its title from the contraction of fixing to and expands the word toward Black possibility and futurity. The poems examine how language carries intimacy, invention, insult, race, gender, and power, moving between family speech, public violence, humor, and hope. One World published the 128 page collection in 2020. It followed Wild Hundreds, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and the anthology The BreakBeat Poets, which Marshall coedited. His involvement with the Dark Noise collective and his essays on breakbeat writing connect Finna to an argument that hip hop is not outside poetry but one of its contemporary forms. That claim appears through rhythm and address as well as subject. Familiar speech becomes a record of belonging, pressure, survival, and imagined futures, while the poems defend invention as a cultural resource.