[2][3] Wicker is the recipient of fellowships from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Foundation.
[4][5][6] His work has appeared in various literary and commercial publications including The Nation, The Atlantic, Oxford American, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere.
[13] He earned an MFA from Indiana University in 2010 and completed a post-graduate fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown the year after.
[18] Reviewing the book in Slate, Jonathan Farmer wrote, "In both sound and sense, Wicker nails the terrible courage of standing out and dignifies it with an abrupt austerity.
[24][25] Of Silencer, renowned critic Stephanie Burt writes, “Wicker makes witty yet serious, encyclopedically allusive work whose excitable energies and wide range of diction belie the gravity of their topics: structural injustice, familial loyalty, uneasy adulthood, and institutional racism.”[26] Wicker began teaching English at the University of Southern Indiana in 2012[27] and joined the creative writing faculty in the MFA program at the University of Memphis in 2017.