![A black-and-white portrait of a middle-aged Syrian-Peruvian man with buzzed salt-and-pepper hair and mustache. He is wearing an Oxford button-down shirt and gazes out beyond the frame.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/64052c79-d4f1-4cd5-9dad-78549ebcef28/matuk-author-photo-by-robert-bear-guerra-2019-take-2.jpg?crop=1000%2C1000%2C0%2C0&width=1000)
Photo by Roberto “Bear” Guerra.
“The entanglement that drives my work is political because it orients us away from ideas of an integrated, singular subjecthood and toward a sense of being that is mutually created and cared for.”
Born in Lima, Peru to a Peruvian father and Syrian mother, and preemptively kidnapped to escape his father’s violence, Farid Matuk has lived in the US since the age of six as an undocumented person, then a “legal” resident, and eventually as a “naturalized” citizen. Matuk is the author of the poetry collections This Isa Nice Neighborhood and The Real Horse. Their poems have appeared in BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Lana Turner, The Paris Review, and Poetry, among others. Matuk’s work has been supported with residencies and grants from the Headlands Center for the Arts and with a Holloway Visiting Professorship at UC Berkeley. Redolent, their book-arts collaboration with artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez, won the 2023 Anna Rabinowitz Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Matuk’s translation of Peruvian poet Tilsa Otta’s The Hormone of Darkness is forthcoming in 2024 from Graywolf Press.
Donor -This award was generously supported by the Poetry Foundation.
This artist page was last updated on: 08.13.2024