Hi. Welcome to truce, my litblog about fiction, works in translation, and interviews with literary critics.
This is also my author site. My bio is below. The drop-down menus above lead to samples of my work. Thanks for visiting!
Email: matt.j.jakubowski at gmail dot com
About Matthew Jakubowski
I am a rather tall writer from Virginia. I’ve lived in West Philadelphia since 2008.
My short stories, book reviews, and interviews have appeared in more than 50 publications worldwide, including The Brooklyn Rail, Music and Literature, gorse, 3:AM Magazine, Full Stop, The Paris Review Daily, Kirkus Reviews, The Kenyon Review Online, Bookforum, Textshop Experiments, The Rumpus, and The Millions.
I was raised in the United States, Germany, and Australia, and earned my bachelor’s in English and Creative Writing from the University of Michigan and my master’s in fiction from Northwestern University. I am a working writer—with more than twenty years’ experience as a journalist, technical writer, and copy editor—and an artist-parent with two children.
My flash fiction has been longlisted for Wigleaf‘s annual top 50 best stories, and I was a finalist for the 2022 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize from Texas Review Press, judged by Renee Gladman. I’ve been active over time as a literary event host, panelist for literary awards, and reader for small presses. With author Christine Kendall, I co-hosted and curated the Cannery Reading Series and Open Mic in West Philadelphia from 2018 to 2021. We featured local novelists, short story writers, translators, playwrights, and journalists, and in 2019 the series earned a Best of Philly honor from Philadelphia Magazine. I served as a panelist for the 2021 National Endowment for the Arts fellowships for literary translation. I was a reader for the independent publisher Rescue Press, serving as part of the team that published Andrea Lawlor’s celebrated novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, in 2017. I also served twice as a fiction judge for the Best Translated Book Award given by Three Percent at the University of Rochester. I was interviews editor from 2013 – 2015 for the translation journal Asymptote, where I had the privilege of editing pieces by Anne Carson and Valeria Luiselli. In 2014, I was awarded a 3QD Arts & Literature Prize judged by novelist Mohsin Hamid. I’m a contributing editor at The Critical Flame and a member of the National Book Critics Circle. My work as a critic focused on gender equity has been covered by The Guardian UK and my work as a literary event organizer has been featured in The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Praise for my writing
“A brief flickering of something that brings to mind Pale Fire, this text about a text about a text about a text is magical and wise. It shimmers.”
—Mohsin Hamid, commenting on my experimental review “Honest Work” in his judge’s statement for the 3 Quarks Daily Arts and Literature Prize.
truce 