Matt Wanat

Background

About Matt Wanat

I teach and write about literature and cinema, now having worked with thousands of students and having taught college (and, briefly, high school) since 1995. Publications include collections of essays Breaking Down Breaking Bad (University of New Mexico Press, 2016) and The Films of Clint Eastwood (University of New Mexico Press, 2018), co-edited with Leonard Engel. My essays on film and literature have appeared in both anthologies and peer-reviewed journals, including Western American Literature, JMMLA, south journal, and Journal of the West. My poetry has appeared in The Wayfarer, and I write creative short and long fiction. Recent scholarly interests include the films of Samuel Fuller and literature of Thomas Pynchon, Wendell Berry, and Katherine Anne Porter. I am primarily interested in intersections of narrative form with questions of sustainability and cultural identity in late twentieth century American literature and film. Areas of expertise include the Western and popular genre, but also my eastern Ohio section of Appalachia, about which I write both creatively and critically, while immersing deeply in blues, popular music, cinema, literature, and classic television and learning to raise poultry and garden.