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Matthew Salesses

He // Him // His

Writer

Blacksburg, Virginia

An Asian man with short black hair in his forties poses outside on a gray, cloudy day. He is wearing tortoiseshell horn-rimmed glasses and a green leather jacket. 

Photo by Grace Salesses.

“My work considers the cultural expectations behind the stories we tell about identity, especially as it pertains to Asians Americans and transracial adoptees.”

Matthew Salesses is the author of eight books, most recently The Sense of Wonder (Little, Brown, 2023), the national bestseller Craft in the Real World (Catapult, 2021), and the PEN/Faulkner Finalist Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear (Little A, 2020). He also wrote The Hundred-Year Flood; I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying; Different Racisms: On Stereotypes, the Individual, and Asian American Masculinity; The Last Repatriate; and Our Island of Epidemics. Forthcoming is a memoir, To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time (Little, Brown). He was adopted from Korea and lives in Blacksburg, VA, where he is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Virginia Tech. Salesses holds a PhD from the University of Houston and an MFA from Emerson College.

Donor -This award was generously supported by Mellon Foundation.

This artist page was last updated on: 01.30.2025

Writing
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Matthew Salesses reads from Disappear Doppelganger Disappear, 2020.

Video courtesy of the artist.

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“Dear Fellow American” by Matthew Salesses, 2014. Short documentary with found documents and original writing.

“To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time” (Excerpt)

Memory is essential to storytelling because stories exist in time. If one were to read a novel random page by random page, the novel would not have its intended effect. The effect comes from the order in which you read its words: a reader must remember what she has read before and make connections to what she reads next.

Without memory the sentence you are reading now would not make sense. By the time you got to the word sense, if you did not remember the words before it, you wouldn’t know what sense referred to.

Our linear experience of time, combined with our selective memory, means that as we live, humans construct ongoing stories about who we are. That is: our memories influence our present actions (you don’t stick your hand in the fire twice) and likewise our present actions influence our memories (sticking my hand in the fire was not in vain: it taught me something).

Essay by Matthew Salesses. Originally published in Longreads, 2019.