Matt Reeck is a translator, scholar, and poet.

As a literary translator, he is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow and 2022 ACLS Fellow. He has also been awarded fellowships from the NEA, the PEN-Heim Fund, the Fulbright Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and ATLAS (Association pour la promotion de la traduction littéraire). He was the Princeton Translator in Residence in Spring 2021.

His translation “Muslim”: A Novel from the French of Zahia Rahmani won the 2020 Albertine Prize, and his forthcoming translation The Wound of the Proper Name from the French of Abdelkébir Khatibi won the 2022 Northwestern University Global Humanities Translation Prize. Mirages of the Mind, his translation with Aftab Ahmad from the Urdu of Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi, was long listed for the Best Translated Book of the Year Award in 2015 from Three Percent. Bombay Stories, his translation with Ahmad from the Urdu of Saadat Hasan Manto, was chosen as The New York Times Editors’ Choice in May 2014.

He translates from French, Hindi, Korean, and Urdu. As a translator, he often chooses books that challenge generic conventions and cultural commonplaces. Beyond literary translation, he has translated art news and academic literary essays. As a scholar, he has published essays on French/Francophone, Hindi, and Urdu literatures that focus on similar goals as his translations. He reviews translations and experimental American poetry.

As a poet, he has published four chapbooks: Love Songs and Laments, Midwinter, The Pastoral City, and The Necessary City. His poems were chosen by Mónica de la Torre and Susan Howe as the winner of the 2010 BOMB Magazine Poetry Prize. His manuscripts have been finalists at Canarium, Cleveland St., Horseless, Interim, Nighboat, Omnidawn, Tarpaulin Sky, and The Song Cave Presses.

In 2010, he collaborated with the visual artist Deborah Simon, the photographer Dan Wonderly, and the composer Michael Whalen in “Coyote Pursues” at St. Ann’s Warehouse Puppet Lab. His poem “And night by the streams of the city” was set to music by the composer John Belkot and performed by the Peabody Symphony Orchestra in 2014. He is also the co-founder and co-editor of the 2010’s art & poetry print magazine, website, chapbook publisher, and drama production organization Staging Ground.

A graduate of Carleton College (BA-English), the University of Kansas (MA-English), Brooklyn College-CUNY (MFA-Poetry), and UCLA (PhD-Comparative Literature), he currently teaches French at St. John’s University in Jamaica, Queens, New York.