David Matlin

David Matlin is a novelist, poet, and essayist. His collections of poetry include the books China Beach, Dressed in Protective Fashion, and Fontana’s Mirror. His first novel How the Night is Divided, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1993. Prisons: Inside the New America from Vernooykil Creek to Abu Ghraib, (North Atlantic Books, 2005), is based on a ten-year experience teaching in one of the oldest Prison Education Programs in the nation in New York State. It Might Do Well With Strawberries (Marick Press, 2008) is a new narrative hybrid with a focus on the years 2004-2005 and the crisis of the new century.

The author’s second novel in a trilogy, A HalfMan Dreaming (Red Hen Press, 2012) begins with the shadow of a Flying Wing. The image remains a startling blank that hovered over Cold War Southern California and extends into the whirlpools of betrayal which have since that time become so sleekly barbaric. Through the telling of a Mexican/American Vietnam War Veteran, the novel mixes voices, events, ghost and ghost worlds and lets these tapestries surface once more in their immense suggestions.  A HalfMan Dreaming is a vision of the Enola Gay and the cauldrons of fragile extremities this novel includes in its longing for a new kind of story-life. The main character, Lupe, returns to America filled with confusion, violence, shame, and the desire to reconstruct his mind and humanity through a personal migration into startling and necessary wonders. The author’s newest book is a collection entitled Up Fish Creek Road & Other Stories (Spuyten Duyvil 2013).

David Matlin is a professor in San Diego State University’s Department of English and its MFA Creative Writing program.