Sebastian Matthews is the author of the memoir In My Father’s Footsteps (W.W. Norton & Co.) as well as two collections of poetry, We Generous and Miracle Day, both published by Red Hen Press. A third collection, Beginner’s Guide to a Head-on Collision, came out from Red Hen Press in 2017. Along with Stanley Plumly, Matthews is the co-editor of three volumes: The Poetry Blues: Essays and Interviews of William Matthews (University of Michigan Press), Search Party: The Collected Poems of William Matthews (Houghton Mifflin), a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize, and New Hope for the Dead: Uncollected Matthews (Red Hen Press). His poetry and prose have appeared in or on, among others, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Blackbird, The Common, From the Fishouse, Georgia Review, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, Poets & Writers, storySouth, The Sun, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, Writer’s Almanac, and Writer’s Chronicle.

Matthews received his MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan. He taught for over a decade at Warren Wilson College in their undergraduate writing program, as well as serving on the faculty at the Great Smokies Writing Program at the University of North Carolina, Asheville and at the Queen’s University of Charlotte, Low-Residency in Creative Writing (MFA). He has been a visiting writer at Franklin and Marshall, the Institute of American Indian Arts, Pitzer College, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (Meacham Conference), UNC-Wilmington’s Writers Week, and the Vermont Studio Center, among others.

Matthews has received fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council, Vermont Studio Center, and Asheville Area Arts Council, as well being awarded a Bernard DeVoto Fellowship in Nonfiction at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.

Formerly the editor of Rivendell, a place-based literary journal, Matthews has served on the editorial board of Q Avenue Press, with whom he designed, edited and produced collaborative chapbooks and letterpress broadsides. He served briefly as poetry editor for Ecotone: Re-Imagining Place and as guest editor at Asheville Poetry Review, working with editor Keith Flynn on its jazz issue.

Matthews’ handmade collages have been exhibited at Asheville Book Works and William King Museum’s Contemporary Regional Gallery. He curated the show From BMC to NYC: The Tutelary Years of Ray Johnson (1943-1967) for the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center and edited its exhibition catalogue.

Matthews currently serves on the board of the Vermont Studio Center and on the advisory board for Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts & Letters. He lives with his wife and son in Asheville, North Carolina, where he is working on a hybrid collection of poems, prose sketches, and snapshots, tentatively entitled In & Among.

The Life & Times of American Crow, initially a boxed-set, limited edition collage novel, is now available as a paperback.