The below message was sent to faculty, staff, and students on December 4, 2025.
Dear Bryn Mawr Community,
I am pleased to announce that our next Bryn Mawr provost will be Airea (Dee) Matthews. Dee's genuine dedication to Bryn Mawr, along with her notable professional accomplishments, strategic leadership, and collaborative spirit, make her an exceptional choice to lead the next chapter of our academic endeavors. I have been impressed by her relational empathy, capacity for big ideas, and many qualities that make her a true strategic leader. Her three-and-a-half-year term will begin on January 1, 2026.
The provost plays a central role in the academic life of a college. Key responsibilities include guiding and collaborating with the faculty on academic strategy, managing all aspects of faculty recruitment, nurturing, and professional development, and continuing to enliven and celebrate the academic vitality in teaching and research that is core to the college's mission. The provost collaborates closely with the deans of the Undergraduate College, the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, and the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research to support exceptional academic experiences for our undergraduate and graduate students.
As a key college leader, Dee will play a central role in the academic aspects of the college's Next Chapter. She views the provost's office as a vital link, where long-term strategy intersects with the practical realities of faculty work. Her dedication to the liberal arts and the rhythm of intellectual life has grown over decades of writing, teaching, mentoring, and community building. In her view, Bryn Mawr can and will evolve without losing its core. It will remain a scholarly community guided by curiosity, compassion, trust, and collaboration. Of equal importance, she is dedicated to ensuring the College continues to promote academic rigor and transformative ideas through daring and imagination.
Dee brings to this role an active intellect shaped by years of leadership across higher education, the arts, and the business world. Her professional life began in the corporate sector, where she spent nearly a decade at Procter & Gamble, honing leadership skills, organizational culture, and strategic decision-making. She carries that experience forward into a distinguished career as a renowned poet and sought-after educator.
Her first collection of poems, Simulacra, received the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Her latest collection, Bread and Circus, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry, the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and was a finalist for the 2024 Hurston Wright Legacy Award in Poetry. Her work has appeared in such publications as Harper's Bazaar, The New York Times, Poetry, The Best American Poets, American Poets, The Rumpus, Four Way Review, Lithub, and Michigan Quarterly Review.
Her civic and national contributions are substantial. She served as Philadelphia's sixth Poet Laureate, helping to build the city's literary ecosystem, curating public programs, and launching an access-focused Speaker's Bureau to democratize artistic opportunity. She is a widely invited speaker, panelist, and visiting writer, with engagements at UPenn, Princeton, Syracuse, Case Western, the University of Virginia, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Kenyon Writers Workshop, Northwestern University, and the London Review of Books, among many others. Her work as an interlocutor for the Free Library of Philadelphia has placed her in conversation with some of the most celebrated writers working today, and her national leadership includes significant service across the arts and literary sectors. She has judged major awards for PEN America, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry, and Words Without Borders, and has served as a nominator for the Whiting Award and the PEN/Osterweil Award — roles that position her as a trusted voice in shaping the future of contemporary literature.
Professor Matthews' creative work has been recognized with a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2022 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, a 2020 Pew Fellowship, and the 2017 Margaret Walker For My People award. In 2016, she received the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, a Kresge Artist Fellowship, and the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.
Matthews holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania as well as an M.F.A. from the Helen Zell Writers' Program and an M.P.A. from the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy, both at the University of Michigan.
At Bryn Mawr, Dee is professor of creative writing and co-chairs our creative writing department. She was awarded the Bryn Mawr Christian Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award in 2020, the 2024 Rosabeth Moss Kanter Change Master Fund, and multiple faculty award grants. She currently serves on the Committee on Academic Priorities and helped guide the formation of the Dialogue Project, as well as acted as mentor to ten Posse Scholars. Her current off-campus efforts include spearheading the development of an artistic refuge in Sicily dedicated to supporting globally persecuted writers and scholars.
Thank you to the provost search committee members: chair Erica Graham, May Cheng, and Stephen Vider. We are grateful for the time and care they dedicated to this essential process. Their work considering all the candidates was thoughtful and thorough. Special thanks also to David Karen for his service as interim provost this semester.
Please join me in congratulating Dee.
Sincerely,
Wendy Cadge
President and Professor of Sociology
Bryn Mawr College
101 N. Merion Ave., Bryn Mawr, PA 19010
Pronouns: she/her
brynmawr.edu
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