Airea D. Matthews
AUTHOR

Airea D. Matthews

Literature & Fiction
Tap the gear icon above to manage new release emails.
Airea D. Matthews’ first collection of poems is the critically acclaimed Simulacra, which received the prestigious 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. The collection explores longing, desire, and inheritance with power, insight, and intense emotion. New Yorker critic Dan Chiasson describes Matthews’s experimental forms as, “Fugues, text messages to the dead, imagined outtakes from Wittgenstein, tart mini-operas, fairy tales: Matthews is virtuosic, frantic, and darkly, very darkly, funny.” Matthews is also the author of Bread and Circus (Scribner US and Picador UK, 2023), a memoir-in-verse that is a bold poetic reckoning with the realities of class and race and their intergenerational effects. For her writing, Matthews earned a 2020 Pew Fellowship as well as the 2017 Margaret Walker For My People award. In 2016, she received both the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Ireland, The New York Times, Georgia Review, Callaloo, Gulf Coast, Best American Poetry, American Poet, The Rumpus, Tin House, Los Angeles Review of Books, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. Matthews holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania as well as an M.F.A. from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program and an M.P.A. from the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy, both at the University of Michigan. In 2022, she was named Philadelphia’s Poet Laureate. She is an associate professor and co-directs the poetry program at Bryn Mawr College, where she was presented the Lindback Distinguished Teaching award.
Read more Read less

Try Audible membership today. Start enjoying the benefits.

Try Audible for free with an audiobook of your choice.
Try Audible free
Automatically renews at AUD $16.45/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Most Popular

Product list
  • Bread and Circus cover art

    Non-member price: $12.99 or 1 Credit

    Sale price: $12.99 or 1 Credit

    Try for $0.00