Matthew Minicucci is the great-grandson of Napolitano immigrants. He grew up in an Italian-American household in Massachusetts and received his BA in Classical Languages and Literatures at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and his MFA in Poetry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign here he studied with Brigit Pegeen Kelly and Tyehimba Jess. His first full-length collection, Translation (Kent State University Press), was chosen by Jane Hirshfield for the 2014 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. His second full-length collection, Small Gods, won the 2019 Stafford/Hall Oregon Book Award, chosen by Forrest Gander. About the collection, Gander remarked “The lexicon is inordinately rich, somehow both precise and lush. And the poems are insistently but never portentously philosophical, grounded as they are in bailing twine, bared teeth, baptismal tears. Disinterested in irony, softly-toned, Minicucci opens depths inside us that we can sense long after we’ve closed his book.” His most recent collection, Dual (Acre Books, 2023), examines masculinity and gun violence as he brings to life the grammatical concept of the dual, a number that is neither singular nor plural, now lost in English but present in other languages both extant and ancient. His poetry and essays have appeared in a number of journals including APR, The Believer, the Cincinnati Review, the Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, the Southern Review, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards from organizations including the Stanley P. Young Fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Dartmouth Poet-in-Residence fellowship from Dartmouth College and the Frost House, a Writer-in-Residence fellowship at the John Day Fossil Beds from the National Parks Service, and a fellowship from the James Merrill House, among others. A long-time member of the board of advisors for Ninth Letter, the award-winning journal at the University of Illinois, he is currently an Assistant Professor in the Blount Scholars Program at the University of Alabama.