Matthew Vollmer
Matthew Vollmer is the author of two short-story collections—Future Missionaries of America and Gateway to Paradise—as well as three collections of essays—inscriptions for headstones, Permanent Exhibit, and This World Is Not Your Home: Essays, Stories, & Reports. He was the editor of A Book of Uncommon Prayer, which collects invocations from over 60 acclaimed and emerging authors, and served as co-editor of Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, “Found” Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts. His work has appeared in venues such as Paris Review, Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, Tin House, Oxford American, The Sun, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Best American Essays. A winner of an NEA and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he directs the MFA program at Virginia Tech, where he is a Professor of English. His latest book, All of Us Together in the End, was published by Hub City Press in 2023.
I first met Tom McAllister in 2004, when we were first-year students at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. At thirty, I felt like an old timer; McAllister seemed by comparison an upstart kid.



