Matthew Zapruder

Matthew Zapruder (1967) is an American poet, editor, translator, and professor.

His second poetry collection, The Pajamaist, won the 2007 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and was chosen by Library Journal as one of the top ten poetry volumes of 2006. His first book, American Linden, won the Tupelo Press Editors' Prize. His most recent book of poetry, Sun Bear, brings the strangeness of poetry closer to everyday life.

Life
His poems have appeared in The Boston Review, The Believer, Fence, Bomb, McSweeney's, Jubilat, Conduit, Harvard Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. In 2007, he was a Lannan Literary Fellow in Marfa, Texas. He is the winner of the Tupelo Poetry Editors' Prize and the 2008 May Sarton poetry award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. As of late 2008, German and Slovenian language editions of his poems were planned from Luxbooks and Serpa Editions. Luxbooks is also publishing a separate German language graphic novel version of his poem "The Pajamaist."

He was co-founder (with Brian Henry) and editor-in-chief of Verse Press, which has since become Wave Books and moved from Amherst, Massachusetts to Seattle, Washington. Matthew Zapruder and Joshua Beckman, who became friends when Beckman performed a reading in Amherst, are co-editors of Wave Books.

He is an editor for Wave Books, and teaches at Saint Mary's College of California.

Zapruder received his B.A. from Amherst College, with a BA in Russian Literature, his M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley with an MA in Slavic Languages, and his M.F.A. from the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He teaches in the low residency MFA program at the University of California, Riverside-Palm Desert and at the Juniper Summer Writing Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He taught at New York University, The New School, the University of Houston, St. Mary's College of California, and University of California, Berkeley. He lives in San Francisco and is the brother of American musician and songwriter Michael Zapruder, and is the guitarist in the American band The Figments.

In 2011, he was a Guggenheim Fellow. He had a Lannan Foundation Residency in Marfa, Texas. He won the May Sarton prize, American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In the fall of 2012, Zapruder's poetry was adapted and performed at Carnegie Hall with composition by Gabriel Kahane and Brooklyn Rider.

Full-length poetry

 * American Linden (Tupelo Press, 2002) ISBN 9780971031098,
 * The Pajamaist (Copper Canyon Press, 2006) ISBN 9781619320666,
 * Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon Press, 2010) ISBN 9781556593222,
 * Sun Bear (Copper Canyon Press, 2014) ISBN 9781556594632,

Nonfiction

 * Why Poetry (HarperCollins, 2017) ISBN 9780062343079,

Memoir

 * Story of a Poem: A Memoir (The Unnamed Press, 2023) ISBN 978−1−951213688

Translations

 * Secret Weapon: The Late Poems of Eugen Jebeleanu (Coffee House: 2007)

Anthologies

 * Legitimate dangers: American poets of the new century, Editors Michael Dumanis, Cate Marvin, Sarabande Books, 2006, ISBN 978-1-932511-29-1