Matthea Harvey

Born in Germany on September 3, 1973, Matthea Harvey spent the first eight years of her life in Marnhull, England, before moving with her family to Milwaukee in 1981. Later, she earned her BA in literature at Harvard University and an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Harvey is the author of If the Tabloids Are True What Are You? (Graywolf Press, 2014); Of Lamb (McSweeney’s, 2011), a collaboration with artist Amy Jean Porter; Modern Life (Graywolf Press, 2007), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Sad Little Breathing Machine (Graywolf Press, 2004); and Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form (Alice James Books, 2000). She is also the author of the children’s books Cecil the Pet Glacier (Schwartz & Wade, 2013) and The Little General and the Giant Snowflake (Tin House Books, 2009).

Poet Dean Young has called Harvey’s poems “marvelous contraptions […] that explore and present artifices in the best sense, as disclosures of fabrication into plays of significance […] and [are] always ravishingly complex.” Poet Jorie Graham describes Harvey’s work as “generous, urgent and savingly committed to beauty.”

Harvey is a contributing editor at jubilat and BOMB Magazine and has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Warren Wilson College, the Pratt Institute, and the University of Houston. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.