Bio

Matthew Zapruder is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon 2010), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Sun Bear (Copper Canyon, 2014), as well as a book of prose, Why Poetry, forthcoming from Ecco Press in 2015. He is also co-translator from Romanian, along with historian Radu Ioanid, of Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems of Eugen Jebeleanu (Coffee House Press, 2007). His poems, essays and translations have appeared in many publications, including Tin House, Paris Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Bomb, Slate, Poetry, and The Believer. He has received a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship, a William Carlos Williams Award, a May Sarton Award from the Academy of American Arts and Sciences, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship in Marfa, TX. An Assistant Professor in the St. Mary’s College of California MFA program and English Department, he is also Editor-at-Large at Wave Books. He lives in Oakland, CA.

 

LONGER BIO

Matthew Zapruder is the author of four collections of poetry: American Linden (Tupelo Press, 2002), The Pajamaist (Copper Canyon, 2006), selected by Tony Hoagland as the winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Come on All You Ghosts, published by Copper Canyon in Fall of 2010. Come On All You Ghosts was the 2010 Goodreads Readers’ Choice selection for poetry, and was also selected as one of the year’s top 5 poetry books by Publishers Weekly, as well as the 2010 Booklist Editors’ Choice for poetry, and the 2010 Northern California Independent Booksellers Association poetry book of the year. His fourth collection of poems, Sun Bear, was published by Copper Canyon Press in spring 2014.

He is also co-translator of Secret Weapon, the final collection by the late Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu (Coffee House Press, 2007). German and Slovenian language editions of his poems were published in 2009 by Luxbooks and Serpa Editions; Luxbooks also published a separate German language graphic novel version of the poem “The Pajamaist,” Der Pyjamaist, translated by Ron Winkler and illustrated by Martina Hoffman. His collaborative book with painter Chris Uphues, For You in Full Bloom, was recently published by Pilot Books in 2009.

His poems, essays and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in many publications, including Open City, Bomb, Harvard Review, Paris Review, The New Republic, The Boston Review, The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, The Believer and The Los Angeles Times. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in many anthologies, including Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll, Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, and Best American Poetry 2009 and 2013. In Fall 2007 he received a residency fellowship in Marfa, Texas, from the Lannan Foundation, and he was a recipient in 2008 of a May Sarton prize from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Zapruder has taught in the New School University and New York University MFA Programs in Creative Writing. In fall 2008 he taught as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the MFA Program at the University of Houston, and in 2010 he was a Visiting Writer at St. Mary’s College of California, as well as the 2010 Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at the University of California-Berkeley. The recipient of a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives in Oakland, where he is Editor at Large for Wave Books, and teaches poetry as a member of the Core Faculty at the MFA in creative writing and in the English department at St. Mary’s College of California.