Matthew Pitt

Matthew Pitt is a native of St. Louis: yes, the city with the Gateway Arch; yes, the view is spectacular; no, he would not recommend visits by the claustrophobic. Arch asides aside, Matthew's first book of fiction, the short story collection ATTENTION PLEASE NOW, won the Autumn House Press Fiction Prize. For more info about the book, advance praise, an excerpt, and more, click the link on the right-hand column.

Matthew is a graduate of Hampshire College and New York University, where he was a New York Times fellow. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals, magazines and anthologies as these: Oxford American, The Southern Review, The Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, New Letters, Witness, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Harcourt's BEST NEW AMERICAN VOICES. His work has been cited in the BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES, BEST AMERICAN NONREQUIRED READING, and PUSHCART PRIZE anthologies. His stories have won prizes from Inkwell (judged by Martha Cooley), the Salem College Center for Women Writers (judged by Ellen Gilchrist) and The Madison Review. Other wonderful organizations have provided wonderful grants: Mississippi Arts Commission, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the Santa Fe Writers Project (selected by Pagan Kennedy), and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

In the years since leaving St. Louis, Matthew has paid rent in Amherst and Northampton, MA, Brooklyn and New York, NY, Austin, TX, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles, CA. He can proudly mention that he received security deposits back from every landlord. He can also say he’s held a number of jobs to pay those rent checks—some making for prouder mentions than others. A few gigs of note or infamy: writer’s assistant on an NBC sitcom; book editor; portrayer of mascots, including a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle; member in good standing of the United Auto Workers (for a phone fundraising job); plasma donor.

More recently, he has written scores of articles, essays, and book, food, and theatre reviews for scads of forums and publications: Oxford American, Smithsonian, Poets & Writers, the National Book Foundation, The Rumpus, McClatchy Publications, and Food Network Magazine. He has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, and has taught creative writing at New York University, Penn State Altoona, the Bayard-Rustin High School for the Humanities, and the Bronx Writers’ Center. He lives on the Gulf Coast with his wife Kimberly—who has led efforts for post-Hurricane Katrina recovery for the past three years—and two young daughters. The older one expects a recitation of Goodnight, Moon while tucking her in each evening, and he is only too happy to oblige.