Airea Dee Matthews, associate professor and co-chair of creative writing, has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry. She is one of 188 distinguished 2024 Fellows selected for both their past accomplishments and exceptional promise.
“The Guggenheim Fellowship is a life-changing recognition,” Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, says in the Foundation’s announcement. “It’s a celebrated investment into the lives and careers of distinguished artists, scholars, scientists, writers and other cultural visionaries who are meeting these challenges head-on and generating new possibilities and pathways across the broader culture as they do so.”
For the past 99 years, the Foundation has provided grants that allow grantees to devote time to their scholarship and craft, to allow for as much creative freedom as possible. The Foundation receives approximately 3,000 applications each year and, since its founding in 1925, has awarded more than $400 million.
“I am thrilled to have my work and my next project honored with the recognition of the Guggenheim," Matthews says. "This gift offers me the time and space to innovate on the page and concoct new approaches to the craft while materializing poetic possibility.”
It is the second honor this year for Matthews, whose book of poetry Bread and Circus is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Update: Matthews won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Bread and Circus on April 19). Matthews was also Philadelphia’s poet laureate from 2022 – 2023.