Matthew Zapruder

Matthew Zapruder was born in 1967 in Washington, D.C. He received a BA from Amherst College, an MA from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

His sixth collection of poetry, I Love Hearing Your Dreams, is forthcoming from Scribner in September, 2024. He is the author of five previous collections of poetry, including Father’s Day, Sun Bear, and Come on All You Ghosts, as well as Why Poetry (Ecco/Harper Collins) and Story of a Poem (Unnamed). He is editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. From 2016-17 he held the annually rotating position of Editor of the Poetry Column for the New York Times Magazine. He teaches in the MFA in creative writing at Saint Mary’s College of California.

He has received a 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. His poetry has been adapted and performed at Carnegie Hall by Composer Gabriel Kahane and Brooklyn Rider, and was the libretto for Vespers for a New Dark Age, a piece by composer Missy Mazzoli commissioned by Carnegie Hall for the 2014 Ecstatic Music Festival. In 2000, he co-founded Verse Press, and is now editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. From 2016-7 he held the annually rotating position of Editor of the Poetry Column for the New York Times Magazine. The Guest Editor of Best American Poetry 2022., he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he teaches in the MFA in creative writing at Saint Mary’s College of California.