Airea D. Matthews

Airea Dee Matthews is an American poet. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing and the co-director of the Creative Writing Program at Bryn Mawr College.^[1] She was named the 2022–23 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia.^[2]

Airea D. Matthews
Matthews at the 2025 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books
Nationality	American
Alma mater	University of Pennsylvania; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Genre	Poetry

Education and early life

Matthews received her B.A. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program and an M.P.A. in Social Policy from Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, both at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.^[1][2]

Career and writing

Apart from her professorship at Bryn Mawr, Matthews is a visiting professor and scholar at the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University. There she helped to develop the Poets and Scholars Summer Writing Retreat and the “Race, In Theory” Fellows Humanities Seminar.^[3]

Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2015, American Poet, Four Way Review,^[4] The Missouri Review,^[5] Muzzle,^[6] The Baffler,^[7] Callaloo, Indiana Review, WSQ,^[8] SLAB, Michigan Quarterly Review,^[9] and Vida: Her Kind.^[10]

Works

• Simulacra, Yale University Press, March 2017. ISBN 9780300227932, OCLC 999894143
• Bread and circus, Scribner, 2023. ISBN 9781668011454, OCLC 1347427680

Awards and honors

In January 2022, Matthews was chosen as the sixth Poet Laureate of Philadelphia for the 2022–2023 term.^[2]

Matthews was awarded a fellowship from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage in 2020.^[11]

In 2016, she won the Yale Younger Poet award, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from the 2016 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.^[1][10] In 2017, she was a James Merrill House fellow.

In 2024 she received a PEN Oakland – Josephine Miles Award for Bread and Circus.