MATTHEW SALESSES

Speaker + bestselling novelist and creative writing Scholar + GRIEF NAVIGATOR + IDENTITY EXPLORER

Located Near: Blacksburg, Virginia

Book Matthew salesses to speak at your event

speaking topics

GRIEF, LOVE, AND WANTING A BETTER WORLD
NAVIGATING LOSS
MENTAL HEALTH
EMBRACING YOURSELF THROUGH GRIEF
INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES ON DESIRE AND TIME

CRAFT OF STORYTELLING
FICTION WRITING
CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOPS
PEDAGOGY

EXPLORING IDENTITY
KOREAN AMERICAN CULTURE AND IDENTITY
ADOPTEES AND TRANSRACIAL ADOPTION
ASIAN AMERICAN MASCULINITY

event types

KEYNOTES
LECTURES
FIRESIDE CHATS
PANELS
WORKSHOPS
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
BOOK TALKS & READINGS
VIRTUAL EVENTS
MODERATION
INTERNATIONAL EVENTS
FESTIVALS
INTERVIEWS
faculty training

Matthew salesses’s bio

Matthew Salesses (he/him) is an acclaimed creative writing scholar, grief navigator, and identity explorer. He is the author of eight books, most recently The Sense of Wonder, the national bestseller Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping (a Best Book of 2021 at NPR, Esquire, Library Journal, Independent Book Review, Chicago Tribune, Electric Literature, and others), and the PEN/Faulkner Finalist and Dublin Literary Award longlisted novel Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear. 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 (out of print). His forthcoming ninth book is the highly anticipated and stunning memoir To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time (Little, Brown). This groundbreaking exploration of the paradoxes of grief was featured on the most anticipated annual reading lists of the New York Times and LitHub. The experimental narrative offers readers a thought-provoking meditation on what grief can offer the grieving, illuminating the way to embracing yourself, finding your community, and even loving and changing the world. Library Journal declared it an “eloquently distilled” memoir with a “powerful emotional arc” in their starred review.

Matthew was adopted from Korea and enjoys meeting and advocating for other adoptees. In 2015, BuzzFeed named him one of 32 Essential Asian American Writers. His essays can be found in Best American Essays 2020, NPR Code Switch, The New York Times Motherlode, The Guardian, Time, VICE.com, and other venues. His short fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, PEN/Guernica, Witness, and elsewhere. He has received awards and fellowships from, among others, the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, Dublin Literary Award, Bread Loaf, Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, and [PANK] Books.

An Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Virginia Tech, Matthew earned a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston and an M.F.A. in Fiction from Emerson College. He serves on the editorial boards of Green Mountains Review and Machete (an imprint of The Ohio State University Press), and has held editorial positions at Pleiades, The Good Men Project, Gulf Coast, and Redivider. He has read and lectured widely at conferences and universities and on TV and radio, including PBS, NPR, Al Jazeera America, various MFA programs, and the Tin House, Kundiman, and One Story writing conferences.