Born: November 11, 1942
Died: November 12, 1997
Ohio connection: Birth
Cincinnati
Poet, essayist, and educator William Matthews was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on November 11, 1942. He earned a B.A. degree from Yale University in 1965 and an M.A. degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1966. Matthews was cofounder (with Russell Banks) of Lillabulero Press (1966-1974). Matthews was also an educator who taught and served as writer-in-residence at several universities including Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts; Cornell University in Ithaca, New York; the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the University of Iowa. He was a professor of English at the University of Washington at Seattle (1978-1983). At the time of his death, Matthews was a professor of English and director of the creative writing program at the City College of New York (1983-1997). In 1963, Matthews married Marie Murray Harris (divorced in 1974). The couple had two children.
During his lifetime, Matthews published eleven books of poetry including Time & Money (1995) which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. His other books include Ruining the New Road (1970), Sticks and Stones (1975), Rising and Falling (1979), Flood (1982), A Happy Childhood (1984), Foreseeable Futures (1987), and Blues if You Want (1989). Two collections were published posthumously: After All: Last Poems (1998) and Search Party: Collected Poems (2004, edited by his son Sebastian Matthews and Stanley Plumly). Matthews served as president of Associated Writing Programs and of the Poetry Society of America, and as a member and chair of the Literature Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts. He received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund. In April 1997, Matthews was awarded the Ruth Lilly Prize.
William Procter Matthews died in his New York City home of a heart attack on November 12, 1997. He was 55 years old.
Books
Awards:
National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1974, 1983- 84; Guggenheim fellowship, 1980-81; 1983 Ingram Merrill Foundation fellowship; 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award for Time & Money: New Poems; 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Search Party: Collected Poems of William Matthews.
Additional Resources
Wikipedia: William Matthews