MATTHEW SALESSES is the author, most recently, of The Sense of Wonder (Little, Brown, 2023) and the national bestselling craft book Craft in the Real World (Catapult, 2021). His previous works include the PEN/Faulkner Finalist Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear (Little A, 2020) and the Amazon bestseller The Hundred-Year Flood (Little A, 2015). Forthcoming is a memoir, To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time (Little, Brown, 2026).

Matthew was adopted from Korea. In 2015 Buzzfeed named him one of 32 Essential Asian American Writers. He has published essays and short fiction in Best American Essays 2020, NPR Code Switch, The Guardian, Time, Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. In 2025, he received a USA Artists Fellowship, and his work has also been supported by the Borchard Center on Literary Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Inprint, Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, and [PANK] Books, among others. He was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2021.

Matthew is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Virginia Tech, with a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston and an M.F.A. from Emerson College. He serves on the editorial board of the Machete, a nonfiction series 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.