Matthew Zapruder

Matthew Zapruder Poems

Matthew Zapruder Biography

Matthew Zapruder (born 1967 in Washington, D.C.) is an American poet, editor, translator, and professor. His second poetry collection, The Pajamaist (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), 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 (Tupelo Press, 2002) won the Tupelo Press Editors' Prize.His most recent book of poetry, Come On All You Ghosts[3] (Copper Canyon Press, 2010), blends humor and invention with love and loss. 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. Zapruder received his B.A. from Amherst College, his M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley 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 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.)

The Best Poem Of Matthew Zapruder

My Childhood

the orange ball arcs perfectly into the orange hoop
making a sound like a drawer closing
you will never get to hold that
I am here and nothing terrible will ever happen
across the street the giant white house full of kids
turns the pages of an endless book

the mother comes home and finds the child animal sleeping
I left my notebook beside the bed
the father came home and sat and quietly talked
one square of light on the wall waiting patiently
I will learn my multiplication tables
while the woman in the old photograph looks in a different direction

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