Matthew J. Hefti

Matthew J. Hefti is the author of A Hard and Heavy Thing (Gallery / Simon & Schuster 2016), which was named to Booklist's Top Ten Debut Novels of 2016 and Military Times Top Ten Novels of the Year. A Hard and Heavy Thing was also awarded the Wisconsin Library Association's Outstanding Achievement Recognition, and it was selected by the Women's National Book Association as a Great Group Read for National Book Club Month in 2016. Matthew's work has appeared in print in anthologies such as The Road Ahead: Fiction from the Forever War (Pegasus Books 2017), Retire the Colors (Hudson Whitman 2016), MFA vs. NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2014) and others. His literary criticism and cultural and personal essays have appeared at Literary Hub and Electric Literature, among many others. Matthew is a fiction and poetry editor for the Wrath-Bearing Tree. He spent 12 years as an explosive ordnance disposal technician, deploying twice to Iraq and twice to Afghanistan. While enlisted, he earned a BA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing. After he left the military, he got his JD from the University of Wisconsin Law School. He lives with his family in Houston, Texas.