A queer writer of Syrian and Peruvian heritage, Farid Matuk has lived in the U.S. since the age of six first as an undocumented person, then a “legal” resident, and eventually as a “naturalized" citizen. He is the author of the poetry collections This Isa Nice Neighborhood, The Real Horse, and Moon Mirrored Indivisible, forthcoming from University of Chicago Press. His work has been anthologized in The Best American Experimental Poetry and in Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing, among others. Matuk's poems appear in Bomb Magazine, Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly, The Nation, Paris Review, Poetry, A Public Space, and Lana Turner Journal, among others. His work has been supported by The Headlands Center for the Arts and by a Holloway Visiting Professorship in Poetry & Poetics at UC Berkeley. Matuk's book arts project, Redolent, made in collaboration with visual artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez, received the 2023 Anna Rabinowitz Prize from the Poetry Society of America and in 2024 he was named a United States Artists fellow.

Photo Credit: Roberto Guerra