Airea D. Matthews

Airea Dee Matthews is an American poet. She is the Provost and Professor of Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College. She was named the 2022–23 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia.

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.

Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2015, American Poet, Four Way Review, The Missouri Review, Muzzle, The Baffler, Callaloo, Indiana Review, WSQ, SLAB, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Vida: Her Kind.

Works Simulacra, Yale University Press, March 2017. , Bread and circus, Scribner, 2023. ,

Awards and honors In January 2022, Matthews was chosen as the sixth Poet Laureate of Philadelphia for the 2022–2023 term.

In 2016, she won the Yale Series of Younger Poets award, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from the 2016 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. In 2017, she was a James Merrill House fellow.

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