An Evening with Airea D. Matthews and Balocating Prize Announcement

Wed, April 2, 2025 7:00 PM at RCAH Theater, Snyder-Phillips Hall, 361 Physics Rd, East Lansing

Part of our Witness Remember Resist: A Spring Poetry Festival

 

“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

 

Please join us as we welcome Airea D. Matthews for a poetry reading. The evening will open with the announcement of the 2025 Annie Balocating Prize for Undergraduate Poetry.

Reception and book signing to follow in the LookOut Gallery, 2nd floor, Snyder-Phillips Hall.

 

Public parking is free after 6 p.m. in lot 9 (located across Physics Rd. from Snyder-Phillips Hall) and in non-metered spaces and spaces unmarked by permit signs around Snyder-Phillips Hall. Click here to view a detailed map including accessible parking and entrances.

 

Airea D. Matthews is the author of Bread and Circus (Simon and Schuster, 2023), which won the 2024 LA Times Book Prize, and her critically acclaimed debut Simulacra (YUP, 2017), which received the prestigious 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. The collection explores the topics of longing and desire 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.”

Bread and Circus is a memoir-in-verse that combines poetry, prose, and imagery to explore the realities of economic necessity, marginal poverty, and commodification through a personal lens. Of the collection, Gregory Pardlo noted: “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.”

For her writing, Matthews earned a 2020 Pew Fellowship as well as the 2017 Margaret Walker For My People award. In 2016, she received both the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared in Callaloo, Gulf Coast, Best American Poets, American Poet, The Rumpus, Tin House, Los Angeles Review of Books, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem, Callaloo, and Kresge Literary Arts Fellow, Matthews is a founding member of the transdisciplinary art studio The Teeth Factory.

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 Poet Laureate. She is an assistant professor and directs the poetry program at Bryn Mawr College, where she was presented the Lindback Distinguished Teaching award.