Matthew Salesses

Matthew Salesses is the author of "To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time" (forthcoming in December 2026), "The Sense of Wonder," and the national bestselling craft book, "Craft in the Real World". His previous books include "Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear," a Finalist for the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award and longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, and "The Hundred-Year Flood," among others.

Salesses was adopted from Korea. In 2015, Buzzfeed named him one of 32 Essential Asian American Writers. He has received fellowships from the USA Artists Foundation, the Borchard Center on Literary Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Inprint. His essays and short fiction have been published in Best American Essays 2020, NPR Code Switch, The Guardian, TIME, Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere.

Salesses is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing in the MFA Program at Virginia Tech. He has a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Houston and an MFA in Fiction from Emerson College. He serves on the editorial board of Machete, a nonfiction series of The Ohio State University Press, and previously held editorial positions at Pleiades, The Good Men Project, Gulf Coast, and Redivider. He reads and lectures widely at conferences and universities and on TV and radio, including PBS, NPR, Al Jazeera America, various MFA programs, and the Tin House, Kundiman, One Story, and VONA writing conferences.