Matthew Minicucci

Matthew Minicucci
Minicucci at the 2017 Utah Humanities Book Festival.
Born	(1981-01-28) January 28, 1981 Lawrence, Massachusetts, US
Occupation	Poet, teacher
Language	English, Greek (Attic and Homeric), Latin
Nationality	American
Alma mater	University of Massachusetts Amherst University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
Literary movement	New Formalism
Notable awards	Oregon Book Award, Wick Poetry Prize
Website
matthewminicucci.com

Matthew Minicucci (born 1981) is an American writer and poet. His first full-length collection won, Translation, won the 2015 Wick Poetry Prize, and his second collection, Small Gods, won the 2019 Stafford/Hall Oregon Book Award in Poetry. Having received numerous fellowships and residencies, including with the National Park Service, the C. Hamilton Bailey Oregon Literary Fellowship, the Stanley P. Young Fellowship in Poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the James Merrill House, Minicucci was named the 2019 Dartmouth College Poet-in-Residence at the Frost Place.

Career

After completing a degree in Classical Literature and Languages, Minicucci pursued his MFA at the University of Illinois, training with Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Tyehimba Jess, and A. Van Jordan. His chapbook, Reliquary, employs the Stations of the Cross to explore themes later positively received in the full-length Translation. The Kenyon Review remarked the book's ″attention to craft as well as its thematic concerns and narrative devices [invoke] ancient history and myth to make sense of the poet’s own personal history of loss.″

In his citation for the Oregon Book Award, judge and 2019 Pulitzer-prize winner Forrest 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.

Minicucci's poetry, essays, fiction, and reviews have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Believer, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, the Gettysburg Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Massachusetts Review, Oregon Humanities magazine, Passages North, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, Salamander, Southern Indiana Review, The Southern Review, Tupelo Quarterly, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and West Branch, among others. It has also been featured on Verse Daily and Poetry Daily.

He has taught writing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Millikin University, Pacific University, and currently at the University of Portland.

Bibliography

Books

• Small Gods: Poems. A Green Rose Book, New Issues Poetry & Prose / University of Chicago Press. 2017. ISBN 9781936970476. {{cite book}}: External link in |author-link= (help)
• Translation: Poems. Kent State University Press. 2015. ISBN 9781606352625. {{cite book}}: External link in |author-link= (help)
• Reliquary: Poems. Accents. 2013. ISBN 9781936628131. {{cite book}}: External link in |author-link= (help)

Anthologies

• The Cumberland River Review: The First Five Years. Trevecca Nazarene University. 2018. ISBN 9780976629696.
• Booth X. Butler University Press. 2017. ISBN 9780990636441.
• Best New Poets 2014: 50 Poems from Emerging Writers. University of Virginia Press. 2015. ISBN 9780976629696.

Reviews

• "Our Lady of Perpetual Movement: review of Virgin by Analicia Sotelo". The Rumpus. June 22, 2018. Retrieved May 19, 2019.
• "Intentions, Inquiries, and Impossible Tasks: review of Marvels of the Invisible by Jenny Molberg". The Rumpus. February 9, 2018. Retrieved May 19, 2019.
• "Music Always About to Begin: review of Not on the Last Day, But the Very Last by Justin Boening". The Rumpus. March 17, 2017. Retrieved May 19, 2019.
• "Don't Look Back You Said: review of The Eyes the Window by Marci Rae Johnson". Philadelphia Review of Books. Philadelphia, PA. March 10, 2014. Retrieved May 19, 2019.