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Matthea Harvey is a contemporary American poet, writer and professor. She has published three collections, most recently, Modern Life, which earned her the 2009 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award, and a New York Times Notable Book. She has published poems in literary magazines including The New Yorker, The New Republic, Slope, Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review.
Jeannine Hall Gailey described Harvey's Modern Life, as "obsessed with devastated worlds and hybrid forms of life," and the two longest poems in the collection, the “Terror of the Future†and “The Future of Terror,†as abecedarian sequences that examine "the dysfunction between civilian and military populations in a stark, futuristic environment." Although Harvey has said that she "didn’t set out to write political poems," but to explore "that idea of living in the middle of contradiction—in the grey area, between yes and no," the two poems were nonetheless acclaimed by The New York Times as "among the most arresting poems yet written about the current American political atmosphere . . . all the more surprising coming from a writer whose sensibility seems so resistant to our usual ideas about 'political poetry.' "
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