Matt Reeck is a translator, poet, and scholar.
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, ATLAS (Association pour la promotion de la traduction littéraire), the New India Foundation, SALT (South Asian Literature in Translation), and the Albertine Foundation. 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 The Wound of the Name from the French of Abdelkébir Khatibi won the 2022 Northwestern University Global Humanities Translation Prize. The Wound of the Name was also a non-fiction finalist for the 2026 French-American Foundation Translation Prize. The Lost Golden Land, his translation-in-progress from the Hindi novel of Ranendra, was a finalist for the 2026 Armory Square Prize in Translation. What of the Earth Was Saved, his translation of the Hindi poet Leeladhar Jagoori, was a 2025 finalist for the Derek Walcott 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. He often chooses books that challenge generic conventions and cultural commonplaces. Beyond literary translation, he has translated art news and academic literary essays from French. As a scholar, he has published essays on French/Francophone, Hindi, and Urdu literatures that focus on similar goals as his translations. His monograph Ethics of Description: The Anthropological Dispositif and French Modern Travel Writing (Routledge, 2024) traces the influence of modern anthropology across French travel writing and details ways that various writers have fought against the representational curbs of a colonial-modern anthropological mentality. He also reviews translations, translation theory, 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, 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.