As part of the Humanities Program's 2021 poetry series, please join us and the New Writing Series in welcoming poet Matthew Zapruder, author of Father's Day and Why Poetry. A poetry reading from his collections will be followed by a moderated Q&A session. To register, please visit tinyurl.com/zapruder21.

Copies of his work may be purchased through the UC San Diego Bookstore, with free shipping on anything on the Pure Poetry store from April 14 - May 31 with code POETRY21.

Matthew Zapruder
Zapruder’s poems employ nuanced, conversational syntax to engage themes of grief, perception, and logic. As Dana Jennings noted in the New York Times, Zapruder has a “razor eye for the remnants and revenants of modern culture.” Discussing his own development as a writer in the Los Angeles Times, Zapruder addressed the role of rhyme in his work: “[T]he rhyme is what I would call ‘conceptual,’ that is, not made of sounds, but of ideas that accomplish what the sounds do in formal poetry: to connect elements that one wouldn't have expected, and to make the reader or listener, even if just for a moment, feel the complexity and disorder of life, and at the same time what Wallace Stevens called the ‘obscurity of an order, a whole.’”

Zapruder’s first book, American Linden, was published by Tupelo Press in 2002 after winning the Tupelo Press Editors’ Prize. He is also the author of Why Poetry, an impassioned call for a return to reading poetry, as well as four other poetry collections, including Father’s Day. His honors include the May Sarton poetry award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Born in Washington, DC, he lives in Oakland, where he is an associate professor in the Saint Mary’s College of California MFA Program in Creative Writing, as well as editor at large for Wave Books.

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