Come to a reading!
Professor Matthew Gavin Frank will be reading at NMU, Gries Hall Room 167, at 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, September 20, 2011. The reading is free and open to the public. Please join us.
Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of Barolo (The University of Nebraska Press), a food memoir based on his illegal work in the Italian wine industry, and Pot Farm (forthcoming from The University of Nebraska Press), a behind-the-scenes memoir about his work on a Northern California medical marijuana farm. He is also the author of the poetry books, Warranty in Zulu (Barrow Street Press), Sagittarius Agitprop (Black Lawrence Press/Dzanc Books), The Morrow Plots (Black Lawrence Press/Dzanc Books), and the chapbooks Four Hours to Mpumalanga (Pudding House Publications), and Aardvark (West Town Press). Recent and forthcoming work appears in The Best Travel Writing and The Best Food Writing anthologies, The New Republic, Gastronomica, The Huffington Post, The North American Review, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, Crazyhorse, Field, Pleiades, Rosebud, The Literary Review, and others. His work has been featured in such publications as Wine Spectator, The Chicago Tribune, Booklist, Verse Daily, and Publishers Weekly.
Matthew Gavin Frank was born and raised in Chicago. Bitten by the food, wine, and travel bug, he left home at age seventeen, embracing the vagabond lifestyle that often lent itself to work in the restaurant industry. He ran a tiny breakfast joint in Juneau, Alaska, worked the Barolo wine harvest in Italy’s Piedmont, sautéed hog snapper hung-over in Key West, designed multiple degustation menus for Julia Roberts’s private parties in Taos, New Mexico, served as a sommelier in Chicago, and was an invited chef at the Slow Food Nation 2008 event in San Francisco. He later returned to academia and received his MFA in Poetry and Creative Nonfiction from Arizona State University. He has taught creative writing at Arizona State University, SUNY Jefferson, and Grand Valley State University, and to soldiers and their families near Fort Drum in upstate New York on the Canadian border.
Frank is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, a James Beard Award nomination for food writing, an IACP Award nomination, an Artist’s Grant to the Vermont Studio Center, the Sonoran Prize, and numerous grants from the Virginia G. Piper Center for the Creative Arts. He is happy to be a new addition to the English Department at Northern Michigan University where he is amassing the courage to prepare his first batch of whitefish-thimbleberry ice cream.
Email Beverly Matherne, Director of the English Department’s Visiting Writers Program, at bmathern@nmu.edu for more information.
