Airea D. “Dee” Matthews, poet and professor of creative writing, began her three-and-a-half-year term as provost on Jan. 1. Her path to the role has not been straightforward.
“My whole life has been a series of trying to figure out how things work together,” Matthews said. “None of my life has been linear. That lack of linearity means a lot to me. It helps me to see the world, helps me to understand people from different and disparate backgrounds.”
After graduating with a B.A. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania, Matthews spent nearly a decade working at Procter & Gamble, where she had interned throughout college. During that time, writing remained separate from her professional life.
“I never understood writing to be something that was a career,” Matthews said. “I figured I’ll write on the side and I’ll do something else. But the writing pulled me in.”
In 2010, while living in Detroit with her daughter, Matthews began meeting regularly with poet Vievee Francis, now a professor at Dartmouth College.
“We met in a cafe. At the time, I was nursing my daughter, and I had her under a blanket, and I’m taking these notes about poems with my right hand as I’m nursing,” Matthews said. “I just couldn’t get enough of it. Everything seemed like a poem to me.”
The meetings with Francis shifted Matthews’ understanding of writing. “She said, ‘What does a metaphor mean for you?’” Matthews recalled. “It meant so much to me. Nobody had ever asked me what anything meant, they’d only ask me what I knew.” For Matthews, these questions of meaning were more compelling than “the certainty of knowing.”
“I said, I want to live my life this way,” Matthews said. “I want to talk about poems. And I want to be for somebody else what Vievee was for me.”
Francis encouraged Matthews to pursue her MFA at the University of Michigan, where she had previously earned an MPA in Social Policy.
“I went back and I loved it,” Matthews said. “I was an older student, I had four kids at the time. And I really was committed to doing my work. I was committed to writing my poems and getting a book out.”
In 2014, Matthews applied to the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, the oldest annual literary award in the United States.
“I wasn’t going to because I actually didn’t think I had a chance,” Matthews said. “That same manuscript was rejected 30-something times. So every time it got rejected, it would come back to me, and I would change something, and I would send it back out.”
The following spring, Matthews received a call from poet Carl Phillips informing her that she had won the prize for debut collection, “Simulacra.”
“I was mad because I thought somebody was playing on my phone,” she said. “I had to pull over to the side of the road because I actually didn’t believe it happened.”
Matthews joined Bryn Mawr in the fall of 2017, the same year her book was published, after more than a decade of adjunct teaching. Although she had initially avoided teaching after college, she found fulfillment in the classroom.
“I realized I only stayed away from teaching because I grew up in a working-class family,” she said. “My mom always told me to stay away from teaching and nursing because she felt like women of color were often jettisoned to those two fields.”
“I got to the classroom here and I realized I love these people,” Matthews said. “I tell my students … that I care about them and I mean it. I really want to see them succeed, and I want to see them feel proud because they wrote the best poem they could possibly write.”
Matthews served as Poet Laureate of Philadelphia from 2022 to 2023, a role that her son, a former Philadelphia Youth Poet Laureate, encouraged her to pursue.
“One of the things that you do as a poet laureate is you’re an ambassador for the city, and you’re an ambassador for the arts,” she said. “To the degree that you can get other people engaged with the importance of literature, the importance of reading … it felt really aligned with who I was as a person.”
“Everyone sees the world and perceives the world differently,” Matthews said. “To the degree that you make your perception into art, and that perception becomes a form of witness, that’s gorgeous.”
Matthews described herself as “an unconventional leader” given her background: “I don’t have a PhD. I have an MFA, which is a terminal degree, but still, I am a creative. I’m someone that has a heart for people.”
“I see the provost as being the person that stewards the academic life of the institution. You steward it with clarity, you steward it with integrity and with hopefully imagination,” Matthews said.
Matthews framed her role as one that balances continuity and change: “How do you at once honor traditions, and then also think about how you can go to the next level? How do you think seriously about curriculum? How do you think seriously about academic decision-making that’s aligned with mission and integrity and reality?”
“I want to make sure if we follow processes, that the processes make sense, and you’re just not doing something because that’s what your muscle remembers,” Matthews added. “You have to build trust, right? That’s not something people grant you, nor should they. And you build it by doing what you say you’re going to do.”
Matthews emphasized supporting faculty as a priority. “If I don’t do anything else while I’m here, I want to enable them to do what they do best,” she said. “I want to enable them to be able to deliver the types and the kinds of learning experiences that the students need.”
“I see myself … clearing a path,” she said. “I just want to be a way maker. A lot of times we get really set in our ways of doing things. And I’m hoping that I can … clear the path for people just to do what they do best.”
“I want to be the same kind of leader that I am a teacher,” Matthews said. “One that cares deeply, that falls deeply in love with everything that I do and does it as best I possibly can.”
