Matthew Hand is a Southern writer who has lived across the Southeast — from the humid sprawl of Texas and the bayous of Louisiana to the Blue Ridge foothills of Virginia, and mostly in Georgia, where the kudzu grows thick and the stories grow thicker. His fiction explores grief, fragile masculinity, ritual, inherited silence, and the haunted spaces where faith and failure collide.

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His work has appeared in The Arkansas Review, The San Antonio Review, Bull: Men’s Fiction, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the PEN/Dau Short Story Prize. He is currently an MFA candidate at Bennington College, where he is completing his first short story collection, How to Bleed Quietly in Public, and his debut novel, Backmasked.

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When he’s not writing, he’s likely onstage in northern Georgia's theatre community, chasing the same ghosts in a different light. He lives with his wife and four children, still trying to figure out how to build a roof that doesn’t leak.