Matthew Vollmer is the author of two collections of short fiction, Gateway to Paradise (Persea Books, 2015) and Future Missionaries of America (published by MacAdam Cage and Salt Modern Fiction, 2010), as well as two collections of essays, inscriptions for headstones (Outpost19, 2012) and Permanent Exhibit (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2018). With David Shields, he is the co-editor of Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, “Found” Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts (W. W. Norton, 2012), which collects a number of stories that masquerade as other forms of writing (for examples of work that exhibit these traits, visit the Vollmer-curated literaryartifacts.tumblr.com). Vollmer is also the editor of A Book of Uncommon Prayer, a volume of everyday invocations from over 60 writers, each of whom were charged with writing–regardless of their religious inclinations–a prayer. His fifth book, This World Is Not Your Home, was published by EastOver Press in March 2022 and in 2023 Hub City Press published a book-length essay: All of Us Together in the End.
Vollmer’s work has appeared widely in magazines, including: Paris Review, Glimmer Train, The Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, Epoch, Tin House, The Oxford American, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Ecotone, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Antioch Review, Willow Springs, DIAGRAM, Portland Review, Tampa Review, Passages North, PANK, New England Review, The Normal School, Confrontation, Salt Hill, Fugue, PRISM International, and New Letters. Vollmer is the recipient of a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts grant, as well as the Sturm Award for Creative Arts at Virginia Tech. His work has been short-listed three times for the Best American Short Stories series, and appears in Best American Essays 2013. For a brief time, he served as editor for the 21st Century Prose Series for the University of Michigan Press.
Vollmer holds a B.A. in English from the University of North Carolina, an M.A. in English from North Carolina State University, and an M.F.A. in fiction writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. A Professor of English, he is a faculty member of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Virginia Tech. He lives in Blacksburg, Virginia with his wife, Kelly Pender.