Boston College Professor of English Suzanne Matson is among the recipients of the 2012 Creative Writing Fellowship in Prose from the National Endowment for the Arts for a work of fiction currently in progress. Competition for these awards is extremely rigorous; this year the Creative Writing Fellowships Panel reviewed 1179 eligible applications.
Matson, currently chair of the English Department at BC, has taught at the University since 1988.
In addition to the NEA award, she has received fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the American-Scandinavian Foundation. Her most recent novel is The Tree-Sitter, published by W. W. Norton in both hardcover and paperback (2006). Her previous two novels, also from Norton and reissued in paperback by Ballantine, are A Trick of Nature (2000) and The Hunger Moon (1997).
Her books of poems are Durable Goods (1993) and Sea Level (1990), published by Alice James Books. Many of the poems collected in these volumes were previously published in journals including The American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Boston Review, Poetry Northwest, The Southern Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Indiana Review and Shenandoah.
Her autobiographical, literary, and op-ed essays have appeared in periodicals such as The New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe, Child, The Seattle Times, The American Poetry Review, Harvard Review and Mid-American Review.
She also is credited with spearheading a revival of the Greater Boston Intercollegiate Undergraduate Poetry Festival, now held annually at Boston College.
Originally from Portland, Oregon, Matson holds a bachelor’s degree from Portland State University, and master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Washington, where she was awarded the Robert B. Heilman Dissertation Prize, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and the Susannah McMurphy Fellowship.
Originally posted by the Boston College Office of News and Public Affairs.
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