Zapruder, Matthew 1967-

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Zapruder, Matthew 1967-

PERSONAL:

Born 1967, in Washington, DC. Education: University of Massachusetts, Amherst, B.A., M.F.A.; University of California, Berkeley, M.A. Hobbies and other interests: Sports, Boston Red Sox, San Francisco Giants, Washington Redskins, sports talk radio, playing guitar, reading graphic novels, driving alone.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY.

CAREER:

Poet, guitarist. Verse Press, MA (merged with Wave Books in 2005), founder and editor; Wave Books, Seattle, WA, editor, 2005—; The New School, New York, NY, creative writing instructor; Juniper Summer Writing Institute, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, instructor; California Institute of the Arts, visiting professor, 2005. KGB Monday Night Poetry Reading series, cocurator.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Editor's prize, Tupelo Press, 2002, for American Linden: Poems; Lannan literary fellow, 2007.

WRITINGS:

American Linden: Poems, Tupelo Press (Dorset, VT), 2002.

The Pajamaist (poems) Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 2006.

(Translator, with Radu Ioanid) Eugen Jebeleanu, Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems, Coffee House Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2007.

Contributor to periodicals, including the New Yorker, New Republic, Harvard Review, Boston Review, Fence, McSweeney's, Jubilat, Both, and Crowd.

SIDELIGHTS:

Matthew Zapruder is the founder of Massachusetts-based Verse Press, a poetry press that in 2005 merged with Wave Books of Seattle, Washington. A Slavic languages and literature scholar, Zapruder is cotranslator of Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems, a collection by Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu.

Zapruder's own poems are published in a wide range of periodicals, as well as in his own collections. His first, American Linden: Poems, was the recipient of the 2002 Tupelo Press Editor's Prize. Pebble Lake Review Web site contributor Sarah E. Smith felt that the poems of the second, The Pajamaist, exhibit many of the same qualities but are "expanded and refined in the longer poems…. Innovation and surprise are the dual engines that operate The Pajamaist. These poems are full of movement, associative and geographical, which, rather than sounding restless, have the unifying principle of a relentlessly engaged onlooker."

Jacket Web site reviewer Michelle Mahoney wrote that this collection "explores the world with a good-humored inquisitiveness that is engaging. The poems touch on truth, suffering, on damage and reparation, and on poetry itself. They are never static; they are always working toward something. The poems are personal in that in each Zapruder uses memory and experience as gateways to getting at an understanding of what constitutes the self. Yet they are also universal in that the gateways are familiar ones, they are resonant, and are depicted in a voice that invites the reader to enter."

The title poem finds the narrator writing a novel while dreaming and his discovery that suffering can be transferred from one person to another by taking a pill and exchanging pajamas. A Publishers Review critic described the poems of The Pajamaist as "charming, melancholy, hip and at times hopeful."