Airea D. Matthews’ first collection of poems is the critically acclaimed Simulacra, which received the prestigious 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. The collection explores longing, desire, and inheritance with power, insight, and intense emotion. New Yorker critic Dan Chiasson describes Matthews’s experimental forms 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 is also the author of Bread and Circus, a memoir-in-verse contending with the realities of class and race, which was awarded The 2024 LA Times Book Prize in Poetry.

For her writing and service, Matthews earned 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 both the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, POETRY, Poetry Ireland, The New York Times, Georgia Review, Callaloo, Gulf Coast, Best American Poetry, Tin House, Los Angeles Review of Books, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. 

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. From 2022-2023, she served as Philadelphia’s 6th Poet Laureate. She is an associate professor and co-chairs the creative writing department at Bryn Mawr College, where she was presented the Lindback Distinguished Teaching award.

Books by Airea D. Matthews

Bread and Circus

(2023)

As a former student of economics, Airea D. Matthews was fascinated and disturbed by 18th-century Scottish economist Adam Smith, and his magnum opus The Wealth of Nations. Bread and Circus is a direct challenge to Smith’s theory of the invisible hand, which claims self-interest is the key to optimal economic outcomes. By juxtaposing redacted texts by Smith and the French Marxist Guy Debord with autobiographical prose and poems, Bread and Circus demonstrates that self-interest fails when people become commodities themselves, and shows how the most vulnerable—including the author and her family—have been impacted by that failure. A layered collection to be read and reread, with poems that range from tragic to humorous, in forms as varied and nuanced as the ideas the book considers, Bread and Circus explores the area where theory and reality meet.

Simulacra

(2017)

A fresh and rebellious poetic voice, Airea D. Matthews debuts in the acclaimed series that showcases the work of exciting and innovative young American poets. Matthews’s superb collection explores the topic of want and desire with power, insight, and intense emotion. Her poems cross historical boundaries and speak emphatically from a racialized America, where the trajectories of joy and exploitation, striving and thwarting, violence and celebration are constrained by differentials of privilege and contemporary modes of communication. In his foreword, series judge Carl Phillips calls this book “rollicking, destabilizing, at once intellectually sly and piercing and finally poignant.” This is poetry that breaks new literary ground, inspiring readers to think differently about what poems can and should do in a new media society where imaginations are laid bare and there is no thought too provocative to send out into the world.

Praise for Bread and Circus

  • "Like all crowning collections in an oeuvre, this book enacts, with tenderness and intelligence, an erudition that matches the capacious love of its ambitions. Formally ambidextrous, teethed with wit and uncompromising dignity, Matthews engages the archive as a breathing document, refusing to let history be done with itself, and thereby accomplishes what I love most about poetry—especially hers—that it lives, is living."

    — Ocean Vuong, author of Time is a Mother

  • “In her stunning collection Bread and Circus, Airea Matthews uses a bricolage of citations and erasure to reflect on the epigenetic costs of Black dispossession in a country founded on self-interest. Bread and Circus is an authentic journey of enduring love and witness. It is sonorous, erudite, raw—and one that will stay with me always.”

    — Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

  • "I have never read a book of poems that was this honestly, brilliantly, beautifully intimate. Intimacy is a word we use all the time to talk about poems but Airea D. Matthews’ staggering Bread And Circus reminds me that most times that’s just a word with nothing inside it. These poems of family, friendship, history, and bond (in all that word’s layered and clamoring manifestations) show us that getting inside the deepest rooms of our histories takes courage and a fierce kind of loyalty. It means looking squarely at every inch of experience without looking away: the rigorous intellect and the many chambered heart playing fiercely together. To be willing to stay and survive and make one’s own luminous economy. These are poems that abide, a word that comes from both wait and onward. There is no limit to what Airea D. Matthews’ can do. Bread And Circus is the truth of it."

    — Gabrielle Calvocoressi, author of Rocket Fantastic

  • "When sinking into the work of Airea Matthews within Bread and Circus, 'gratitude,' is the word that most eagerly leaps to mind…This is a stunning collection of work, which feels both ahead of its time and also abundantly on time."

    — Hanif Abdurraqib, author of The Little Devil in America

  • “Below these immensely humane, dramatically compelling and formally adventurous poems (one turns the page eager to discover which unexpected route Matthews will take into her subject next) lies not just a hard-won practical wisdom but something rarely, if ever, seen in contemporary poetry: an astonishing and clear-sighted economic literacy. All of which leaves Bread and Circus not just a riveting book about family and individuation, self-interest and altruism, commodity and community, but – at a time when our understanding of their larger context is becoming crucial to our survival – one of critical importance.”

    — Don Paterson, author of The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Metre

  • “With the genius and ferocity of mother love, Airea Matthews’s Bread and Circus shreds our expectations of what poems can be and do while clearing the air of the illusions that cloud our understanding of past, present, self and other. Lift the cover and breathe in the clarity concentrated on these pages."

    — Gregory Pardlo, author of Digest

  • “From page to unrelenting page in this fierce and brilliant book, Airea Matthews shows us just how high the stakes of poetry should be. If you are not writing to save your life, you are not writing in Airea Matthews’ league. That simple. Her vision is encompassing: what are the systems that subordinate us to their own perpetuation? Her vision is intimate: where, then, are our opportunities for grace? If these beautiful poems are to be believed, that grace is to be found, or rather forged, against all odds, at every turning. That is the scale of the achievement here.”

    — Linda Gregerson, author of Prodigal: New and Selected Poems 1976-2014

Contact Airea D. Matthews

For speaking engagements, visit Blue Flower Arts.