William Matthews was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1942 and died suddenly in November, 1997, in New York City. The last book he saw to publication,
Time & Money(1995), won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and in 1997 he won the Modern Poetry Association's Ruth Lilly Award. After he graduated from Yale College and earned a Master's degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he began his teaching career at Wells College in Aurora, N.Y. He then taught at Cornell University, where he ran a small press, and at the University of Colorado at Boulder. From 1978 to 1983, he was a professor of English at the University of Washington in Seattle; from 1983 until his death, he taught at the City College of New York. Like many teaching poets of his generation, he moved…
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Citation: Doody, Terrence. "William Matthews". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 28 October 2000 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2998, accessed 21 November 2024.]