Adrian Matejka is Your Next Monday Morning Poet. You're welcome.
Guggenheim fellow? Check. National Book Award finalist? Check. Pulitzer Prize finalist? Check. Pushcart Prize? Check. Adrian Matejka's poetry has received astonishing recognition and countless awards, but don't take our word for how wonderful he is. Come and hear him for yourself at Unbound in April. He'll be reading from his dazzling collection of work and participating in our panel on Poetry and Boxing.
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Adrian was born in Nuremberg, Germany and grew up in California and Indiana. He is a graduate of Indiana University and the MFA program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He is the author of The Devil’s Garden (Alice James Books, 2003) which won the New York / New England Award and Mixology (Penguin, 2009), a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series. Mixology was also a finalist for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature. His collection of poems, The Big Smoke (Penguin, 2013), was awarded the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The Big Smoke was also a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award, 2014 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and 2014 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His new book, Map to the Stars, was released from Penguin in March 2017. Among Matejka’s other honors are the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award, two grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Julia Peterkin Award, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and a Simon Fellowship from United States Artists. He teaches in the MFA program at Indiana University in Bloomington and is currently working on a new collection of poems, Hearing Damage, and a graphic novel. We are so excited to welcome him to Columbia!