Adrian Matejka is an African-American poet. He graduated from Southern Illinois University Carbondale with an MFA in Creative Writing. He has received fellowships from the Cave Canem Workshop, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and United States Artists. He is the author of The Devil's Garden and Mixology. His third collection, The Big Smoke, is about Jack Johnson and was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award and the 2014 Pulitzer Prize and won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His newest collection, Map to the Stars, was published by Penguin in 2017. His work has appeared in literary journals and magazines including American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and in anthologies including From the Fishouse (Persea Books, 2009) and The Best American Poetry 2010 (Scribner, 2010). He teaches literature and creative writing at Indiana University. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana with his wife, poet Stacey Lynn Brown, and their daughter.
