John Murillo is the current Jay C.and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. A graduate of New York University's MFA program in creative writing, he has also received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, Cave Canem, and the New York Times. He is a two-time Larry Neal Writers' Award winner and the inaugural Elma P. Stuckey Visiting Emerging Poet-in-Residence at Columbia College Chicago. His poetry has appeared in such publications as Callaloo , Court Green , Ploughshares , Ninth Letter , and the anthology Writing Self and Community: African-American Poetry After the Civil Rights Movement . UP JUMP THE BOOGIE is his… first collection.