Greetings from San Francisco

My name is Matthew J. Parker, and I'm a writer, artist, amateur photographer, and shameless tree hugger. I'm also a lecturer in College Writing at UC Berkeley, a proud member of UC-AFT, and I admittedly love teaching almost as much as I do writing. But I came to higher ed late in life, after serving roughly a decade behind bars (love that word, right? Serving. As if I were handing out canapes to suits at a party celebrating prison industrial profits which, in a very real sense, I was), a revolving-door dance with four presidents – Reagan to GWB – and all leading with the drug war jitterbug.  During those years I'd worked a number of odd jobs, mostly in construction,  and maintain an open romance with carpentry, upon which I elaborate below, from my essay Tree Huggers' Last Stand:

Framing homes in upstate Connecticut fortified my bond with trees, both their beauty and utility, like a poem that ambles us easily down forest paths. But wood is more popular than poetry. Much more. Look around you right now. How many gifts from trees do you see? From tires to paper to boxes to that fruit in your wooden bowl (a bowl whose colored webs of grain guarantee that there is not another on the planet like it), wood is our most ubiquitous yet underappreciated form of art.

And speaking of art, in my graphic novel, Larceny In My Blood: A Memoir of Heroin, Handcuffs, and Higher Education, I did all the writing, art, and lettering, this last by hand. A datum that still amazes me to this day because, like most writers, my penmanship is appalling.

Larceny chronicles my transition from prisoner and drug addict to the Ivy League, and my writing has also appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Daily Beast, The Columbia Spectator, The Baltimore Sun, Guernica, The Rumpus, Blavity, The East Valley Tribune, and Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art, among others. I'm also write a column for Vox Populi.