Airea D. Matthews

Airea D. Matthews is the author of the collections Bread and Circus (Scribner, 2023) and Simulacra, winner of the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. New Yorker critic Dan Chiasson describes Matthews's experimental forms in Simulacra 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's work has appeared in Callaloo, Best American Poets 2015, Harvard Review, American Poet, and elsewhere. She was awarded a 2016 Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award, the 2016 Louis Untermeyer Scholarship from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a 2015 Kresge Literary Arts award as well as fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and the James Merrill House.  She is an associate professor at Bryn Mawr College and serves as Philadelphia’s sixth poet laureate.