Matthews, Airea D.: - Airea D. Matthews is Philadelphia's current poet laureate. Her first collection of poems is the critically acclaimed Simulacra, which won the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Gulf Coast, VQR, Best American Poets, American Poet, LitHub, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. Matthews holds a BA in economics from the University of Pennsylvania as well as an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers' Program and an MPA from the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy, both at the University of Michigan. A Pew fellow, she is a professor and directs the poetry program at Bryn Mawr College.