Matthew Ladd was born in Los Angeles and raised in the Texas Panhandle. The most recent the winner of the Anthony Hecht Award, Matt’s first book, the The Book of Emblems, is available on Waywiser Press. He holds an MPhil in Divinity from the University of Cambridge and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Florida. His poems have appeared in such journals as The Paris Review, Yale Review, Virginia Quarterly and Antioch Review, and he has written criticism for The American Scholar, The Humanist and Threepenny Review, among other publications. He also writes an annual poetry review for West Branch, the literary journal of Bucknell University. He currently lives in New York.