Associate Professor of Creative Writing Airea D. Matthews, co-director of ÀÏÍõÂÛ̳'s Creative Writing Program writes in about growing up with her father, "a charming man who elicited fealty through heavy-handed means or flat-out cheating," and the escape she found in playing with Barbie.
"My escape routes were infinitely safer than the world itself, and my favorite co-conspirator was Barbie... In my world of escape, I had many friends, and they all came out of a pink cardboard package with a cellophane window and box tether."
Airea D. Matthews’s first collection of poems,Simulacra,received the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award (Yale University Press, 2017).
Her work has appeared in Best American Poets 2015, American Poets, The Rumpus, Cordite Review (Australia), Four Way Review, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She received the 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and was awarded the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from the 2016 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
Matthews's newest work concerns class and poverty.