Dee Matthews

Airea D. Matthews is a poet, educator, and interdisciplinary thinker whose work explores the intersections of language, economics, race, and social policy. She is the author of Bread and Circus (Scribner, 2023), a memoir-in-verse that received the 2024 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry, the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and was a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. Her debut collection, Simulacra (Yale University Press, 2017), won the 111th Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize.

She has received numerous honors and fellowships, including a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2022 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, a 2020 Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a 2017 Margaret Walker "For My People" Award, and fellowships from the James Merrill House, Callaloo, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Her poems and essays have been published in Poetry, The Yale Review, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, The New York Times, Best American Poetry, Callaloo, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others.

From 2022 to 2023, Matthews served as the sixth Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, a role that recognizes her contributions to the city’s cultural scene. She has a BA in economics from the University of Pennsylvania, an MPA in Social Policy, and an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan.

Matthews is currently developing a writer’s residency in Troina, Sicily, focused on supporting persecuted writers and scholars. She is a Professor of Creative Writing and Co-Chair of the Creative Writing Department at Bryn Mawr College, where she received the Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award and the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Change Master Award.