Matt Valentine

Matt Valentine is a writer and photographer based in Austin, Texas.

He completed a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing at New York University, where he was fiction editor, and later managing editor, of Washington Square. His short stories have been published in several literary journals, including The Greensboro Review, the Madison Review, and Cutbank, which awarded him the 2012 Montana Prize for Fiction. (That prize-winning story, “The Hindu Shuffle,” was later anthologized in Forty Years of Cutbank.)

While in graduate school for creative writing, Matt also refined his photography skills. He worked full time as an arts technologist for the Department of Photography and Imaging at NYU’s Tish School of the Arts and studied independently with several members of the photography faculty. In the aftermath of the September 11th, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, Valentine captured documentary images of the disaster, including one that was widely exhibited and published in the book Here is New York: A Democracy of Photos. (He later wrote about photographing the dust of Ground Zero in a personal essay for Salon, published on the 20th anniversary of the attacks.) Matt’s photography is now mainly portraiture. His photos of writers have been published in the New York Times, New Yorker, Outside, Men’s Journal and many other periodicals, as well as on dozens of book jackets.

Early in his career, Valentine worked as a ghost writer (with and without attribution), helping other people get their life stories onto the page. The first of these projects was the 1999 holocaust memoir Tomorrow Will be Better, by Walter Meyer, which was published by the University of Missouri Press when Valentine was just 22 years old.

Since the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012, much of Matt’s nonfiction writing has addressed gun violence and related issues. His essays, reporting, and commentary on these topics have been widely published in outlets such as The Atlantic, Politico Magazine, the New Republic, and the Washington Post. Together with his colleague Patricia Somers, Matt Valentine co-edited the volume Campus Carry: Confronting a Loaded Issue in Higher Education, which was published by Harvard Education Press in 2020.

Valentine currently teaches a popular course on narrative writing at the University of Texas at Austin.