Airea D. Matthews

Airea D. Matthews received a BA in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program and an MPA from the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Bread and Circus (Scribner Books, 2023), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry, the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and was a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. Her poetry collection, Simulacra (Yale University Press, 2017), was selected by Carl Phillips as the winner of the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets.

New Yorker critic Dan Chiasson describes Matthews’s experimental forms as “[f]ugues, text messages to the dead, imagined outtakes from [Ludwig] Wittgenstein, tart mini-operas, fairy tales: Matthews is virtuosic, frantic, and darkly, very darkly, funny.”

A Cave Canem Fellow and a Kresge Literary Arts Fellow, Matthews is also the recipient of a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2020 Pew Fellowship, the 2017 Margaret Walker For My People Award, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. 

Matthews is an associate professor and codirector of the poetry program at Bryn Mawr College, where she was presented the Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award and the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Change Master Award. She was the 2022–23 Philadelphia poet laureate. In 2022, Matthews received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. 

Currently, in partnership with Real Estate Interests LLC, Matthews is developing a writer’s residency in Troina, Sicily, dedicated to supporting marginalized and diasporic literary voices. She lives between Philadelphia and Troina.