Matthea Harvey

Matthea Harvey (born September 3, 1973) is a contemporary American poet, writer and professor. She has published three collections, most recently, Modern Life (Graywolf Press, 2007), which earned her the 2009 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award, and a New York Times Notable Book.. She has published poems in literary magazines including The New Yorker, The New Republic, Slope, Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review.

Jeannine Hall Gailey described Harvey's Modern Life, as "obsessed with devastated worlds and hybrid forms of life," and the two longest poems in the collection, the “Terror of the Future” and “The Future of Terror,” as abecedarian sequences that examine "the dysfunction between civilian and military populations in a stark, futuristic environment." Although Harvey has said that she "didn’t set out to write political poems," but to explore "that idea of living in the middle of contradiction—in the grey area, between yes and no," the two poems were nonetheless acclaimed by The New York Times as "among the most arresting poems yet written about the current American political atmosphere . . . all the more surprising coming from a writer whose sensibility seems so resistant to our usual ideas about 'political poetry.' "

Harvey has served as the poetry editor of American Letters & Commentary as well as a contributing editor to jubilat and BOMB. She was born in Germany, and grew up in England and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She earned her B.A. from Harvard University and her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She currently lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

Published Works

Poetry Collections

• Modern Life (Graywolf Press, 2007)
• Sad Little Breathing Machine (Graywolf Press, 2004)
• Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form (Alice James Books, 2000)

Children's Books

• The Little General and the Giant Snowflake (Tin House Books, 2009)

Anthologies

• The Best American Poetry 2005

External links

• Author website
• Tarpaulin Sky > Matthea Harvey > Poems from Modern Life
• Tarpaulin Sky > Q&A: Matthea Harvey > by Selah Saterstrom, August 2006
• Poetry Foundation Interview > Post-apocalypse, Poetry, and Robots: A Conversation With Matthea Harvey About Modern Life > by Jeannine Hall Gailey
• BookSlut: An Interview with Matthea Harvey > October 2007
• Review of Modern Life by Matthea Harvey > The New York Times Book Review > Dream Logic by David Orr > 02/17/08
• Alice James Books > Matthea Harvey > Author Page
• Audio: Matthea Harvey at the Key West Literary Seminar, 2010