Poet Matthew Zapruder to Give Glasgow Endowment Reading at W&L The public reading will take place Nov. 12 in Northen Auditorium.

By Emily Innes
November 1, 2024

Washington and Lee University presents a public reading with poet Matthew Zapruder on Nov. 12 at 5:30 p.m. in the Northen Auditorium inside Leyburn Library.

Zapruder’s reading is free and open to the public and is sponsored by the Glasgow Endowment. Copies of his latest poetry collection, “I Love Hearing Your Dreams” (2024), and other recent books will be available for purchase.

“I Love Hearing Your Dreams” is a book of reveries and failed elegies, and takes the reader on an enchanting and harrowing journey through the landscape of dreams and 21st-century hopes and illusions. Throughout the poems in the collection, dreams represent a place of possibility and a glimpse of what the world could be.

“Matthew Zapruder is one of the foremost poets of our time,” said Leah Green, visiting assistant professor of English at W&L. “His poems startle readers into the deepest vaults of human experience without pretending for a moment that the poet is anything but human. Zapruder’s poems are humble though they access the immense, doing something completely new and, at the same time, completely old.”

Zapruder is the author of six poetry collections and two books of prose. His debut collection, “American Linden” (2002), was the winner of the Tupelo Press Editors Prize, and “Come on All You Ghosts” (2010) was selected as one of the year’s top five poetry books by Publishers Weekly, the Booklist Editors’ Choice for poetry in 2010, and as one of The New York Times’s 100 Notable Books of 2011.  Zapruder’s poetry has been translated into German and Slovenian, and been adapted by some of America’s most exciting young composers. His poems, essays and translations have appeared in many publications, including Harper’s Magazine, the American Poetry Review, the Paris Review and The Los Angeles Times, as well as in several anthologies. Zapruder received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011.

Zapruder received his bachelor’s degree in Russian literature at Amherst College, a master’s degree in Slavic languages and literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in poetry at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose and translations, and teaches in the MFA program at Saint Mary’s College of California.