Cleopatra Mathis is an American poet who since 1982 has been the Frederick Sessions Beebe Professor in the English department at Dartmouth College, where she is also director of the Creative Writing Program. Her most recent book, her eighth, is After the Body: Poems New and Selected (Sarabande Books, 2020). She is a faculty member at The Frost Place Poetry Seminar. Her first five books of poems were published by Sheep Meadow Press, and are distributed by University Press of New England. Her fifth book, What to Tip the Boatman?, won the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poems in 2001. Prizes and honors for her work include two National Endowment for the Arts grants, in 1984 and 2003; the Peter Lavin Award for Younger Poets from the Academy of American Poets; two Pushcart Prizes, 1980 and 2006; a poetry residency at The Frost Place in 1982; a 1981-82 Fellowship in Poetry at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and fellowship residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell; The May Sarton Award; and Individual Artist Fellowships in Poetry from both the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts and the New Jersey State Arts Council. Cleopatra Mathis' work has appeared widely in magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Tri-Quarterly, The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, and AGNI.
Portrait by Jon Gilbert Fox
