Matt Mason

Books by Matt Mason

Things We Don't Know We Don't Know

by Matt Mason

The Backwaters Press, 2006.

About Me

Matt Mason has won a Pushcart Prize and 2 Nebraska Book Awards (for Poetry in 2007 and Anthology in 2006); organized and run poetry programming with the U.S. Department of State in Kathmandu, Nepal and Minsk, Belarus; and been on 5 teams at the National Poetry Slam. He also edits http://PoetryMenu.com, a listing of every Nebraska poetry event.

Matt is Executive Director of the Nebraska Writers Collective, board president of the Nebraska Center for the Book, and has served as the Nebraska State Coordinator for Poetry Out Loud, a Poetry Foundation/NEA program. Through the Nebraska Writers Collective, Matt recently put on the area's first Louder Than a Bomb Youth Poetry Festival to great success, ensuring it will be back in 2013.

His book, "Things We Don't Know We Don't Know" is widely available, and his chapbooks "Mistranslating Neruda," "When The Bough Breaks," "Red, White, Blue," "Coffee and Astronomy," and "Make Star Love, Not Star Wars" are harder to find but are out there somewhere.

The Nebraska Writers Collective is a nonprofit serving students, teachers, and poets by presenting poetry as a lively, enriching art form through endeavors like their Poets on Loan program in the schools and the Louder Than a Bomb: Omaha Youth Poetry Festival.

Why do you write?

I love it. It helps me process the world around me and within me. God, that sounds cheesy. But it's accurate.

Any favorite authors? Books?

Galway Kinnell, Denise Duhamel, Carolyn Forche, Ron Koertge, Ted Kooser, William Kloefkorn, Neil Harrison, Sarah McKinstry-Brown, David Clewell, William Trowbridge, John Keats, Sherman Alexie, Robert Frost, Bob Hicok, Brenda Hillman, Sharon Olds, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Billy Collins, Pablo Neruda, Li-Young Lee> If I re-did the list tomorrow, it could look completely different...