About Matt Valentine

Matt Valentine teaches writing at the University of Texas at Austin, in the Department of English and in the Plan II Honors Program. Matt was born in Alaska and has lived all over the U.S., but his deepest roots are in Texas. He completed a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing at New York University, then worked as a journalist in Pennsylvania before returning to Austin. He continues to write and has published stories and essays in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Salon, and several literary journals. His reporting on gun violence for Politico Magazine and other media outlets culminated in a book, Campus Carry (Harvard Education Press, 2020), co-edited with Patricia Somers. Also a professional photographer, Matt has published portraits in The New York Times, Men’s Journal and Outside. He lives with his wife, Suzi (an analyst at Apple), and son, Robert.

Creative Writing

I teach a course called Writing Narratives for the Plan II Honors Program at the University of Texas at Austin, where I’ve been a lecturer since 2007. I also teach writing workshops in the Department of English. My training is in the craft of fiction, which I studied under E.L. Doctorow, Paule Marshall and others in the MFA program at New York University. I do still occasionally write fiction, but these days my creative work tends toward memoir and lyric essay, such as this recent piece in Salon.

Journalism

I have worked intermittently as a journalist and photojournalist. By unhappy accident, I’ve found myself mostly covering the gun violence beat. (It started with one article for The Atlantic in 2013. Research for that story led me to other leads, and then tips and assignments.) It’s a fascinating topic, but also a difficult one that can be exhausting, so I occasionally take a self-imposed hiatus from writing about guns and the people they affect.

Public Scholarship

I am not a research scholar in any traditional sense. But reporting on guns and gun violence for a decade and interviewing survivors of gun violence, policy makers, professional shooters, gun lobbyists, medical professionals, historians, activists, social scientists, lawyers and other stakeholders, I have accumulated some knowledge and perspective on these issues. In 2015, after the Texas legislature passed SB 11, the campus carry bill, my worlds collided—my colleagues in academia were suddenly very interested in the same issues I had been writing about for general audiences in popular media outlets. There was opportunity for collaboration, culminating in the book Campus Carry (Harvard Education Press, 2020), which I co-edited with Patricia Somers, an associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy in UT’s College of Education.