Matthew Zapruder Journalist Profile

Articles

Matthew Zapruder: ‘Failed Elegy’

Nov 17, 2024 | theatlantic.com | Matthew Zapruder

Explore the December 2024 IssueCheck out more from this issue and find your next story to read. View MoreIt seems these days every poem is a failed elegyfor the world. Each one asks correctly, what gooddid writing this do? I cannot deny I often feel angerat the similarities between me and an oil company, especiallyon what is once again the hottest day ever recorded. It is so easy to do nothing except lament our successat writing useless laments.
I Love Hearing Your Dreams

Sep 17, 2024 | matthewzapruder.substack.com | Matthew Zapruder

Dear Friends,I hope you’re all well as we move into fall, or as I like to call it, Bye Bye Leafies season. I’m on a semester long sabbatical, which seems to mainly involve catching up on long deferred tasks and getting reacquainted with my guitars, amps, and effects pedals, and playing with some good friends here in a new band called The Date Nights, as well as with my old friends The Figments back in Western Mass.
Fall 2024: Poetic perspectives from 'Undocumented Diaspora' - and 10 new books for a season of change

Sep 5, 2024 | datebook.sfchronicle.com | Linda Watanabe McFerrin |Tim Z. Hernandez |Matthew Zapruder |Seema Yasmin

Fall promises a bounty of fantastical fiction, nonfiction titles ranging from memoirs to psychology-based self help, poetry and more. Photo: Getty ImagesBig changes are coming this fall, with the U.S. presidential election casting a particularly long shadow over just about everything, including the book world.
The Elegant Trogon and Poem for Robert Desnos

May 24, 2024 | merionwest.com | Matthew Zapruder

“I have/a secret pigeon in my heart./I keep it in a cage composed of object lessons and feed it/moral law.”The Elegant TrogonThe South American trogonis a gentle bird with weak legsand soft colorful feathers. It nibbles holes in treesto make its nest. One flewinto my sleep and droppeda golden tooth into my supinatedhand, then perched croakingon a twig. It appearedto be wearing spectacles. Special effects, said an EasternElusive Spadefoot Toad,digging calmly as a scholarof the Era of Good Feelings.
Paris Review - Tourmaline

Mar 20, 2024 | theparisreview.org | Matthew Zapruder

In 1985, after seventeen New York publishers had rejected City of Glass, the lead novella in The New York Trilogy, it was published by Sun and Moon Press in San Francisco. The other two novellas, Ghosts and The Locked Room, came out the next year. Paul Auster was thirty-eight. Although he wrote reviews and translations regularly and his prose poem White Spaceshad been published in 1980, the trilogy marked the true start of his literary career.
Real Blue Antelope By Matthew Zapruder and A Way In By Zachary Schomburg

Nov 10, 2023 | theadroitjournal.org | Matthew Zapruder |Zachary Schomburg |James Tate

Matthew Zapruder is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Father’s Day, as well as Why Poetry, and Story of a Poem. In 2000, he co-founded Verse Press, and is now editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. In 2022, he was the Editor of Best American Poetry. He lives in Northern California, and teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of California.
Thirteen Jewish Writers Share Their High Holiday Reading Recommendations

Sep 7, 2023 | jewishbookcouncil.org | Matthew Zapruder |Lisa Carver |Jake Cohen

Skip to main content Jewish Book Council, founded in 1943, is the longest-running organization devoted exclusively to the support and celebration of Jewish literature. Get the latest reviews, news, and more in your inbox. In celebration of the High Holidays, we asked thirteen writers to share a book they would recommend reading during this season.
Attuning Yourself to Yourself: a Conversation with Victoria Chang

Aug 28, 2023 | airlightmagazine.org | Matthew Zapruder

Editor’s note: On April 18, 2023, poet Victoria Chang was awarded the second annual Chowdhury Prize in Literature in a ceremony on the campus of the University of Southern California. The prize is intended for mid-career writers, as much for what they might do in the future as for what they have produced in the past. In that sense, Chang is an ideal recipient.
“My Grandmother’s Dictionary”

Aug 14, 2023 | newyorker.com | Matthew Zapruder

It must have arrived in the handsof a salesman whose nameshall remain unrecorded. Let’scall him the handsome stranger. She saw him through the littlewindow next to the doorand knew although she did notbelieve she believed in suchthings she had loved himin a former life. She gave hima glass of her legendary teaand let him go. My grandfatherwas upstairs in the immaculateattic where after they diedI found this typewritersleeping among old blueprints.
Poets Jennifer Michael Hecht and Matthew Zapruder on Wonder, the Secular Sacred, and the Surprising Power of “Once Upon a Time”

Apr 5, 2023 | lithub.com | Matthew Zapruder

I’ve known Jennifer Michael Hecht since the early 2000’s, when both of our first books of poetry came out around the same time from Tupelo Press. I was immediately struck by her brilliance, charm, creativity, generosity of spirit, and ability to synthesize disparate ideas. Though I first knew her as a poet, I was unsurprised to see those same qualities in her prose.