Matt Bondurant is a Professor of English
Research Interests
Teaching and research interests include Fiction Writing, Contemporary Literature, American Romanticism, 20th Century American Literature, The Novel, Postmodernism, Existentialism, The Problem of Evil, Cults & New Religious Movements, Documentary Films, Screenplays
Biography
Matt Bondurant’s latest novel, North Country, was released nationwide in November of 2025. His previous novels include Oleander City, a historical novel about the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, The Night Swimmer, which was featured in the New York Times Book Review and Outside Magazine, The Wettest County in the World, an international bestseller that was adapted into the feature film Lawless, starring Tom Hardy, Shia Labeouf, Jessica Chastain, and Gary Oldman, and his first novel, The Third Translation, also an international bestseller, translated into fourteen languages.
Matt has written feature articles, essays, and reviews for Outside Magazine, Newsweek, and the Huffington Post, among other magazines and newspapers. Specializing in adventure and endurance events, he’s published articles in Texas Monthly magazine about competing in the Texas Water Safari - "The World's Toughest Canoe Race” and in participating in Ned Denison’s English Channel Swim Training Camp in Ireland, the “most brutal, the most unforgiving, the most downright dastardly difficult open water swimming camp in the world” for Outside Magazine. His non-fiction piece, “The Real Thing” was selected for the 2017 Best Food Writing anthology.
Matt has sold three original screenplays including development deals with HBO/Cinemax and Warner Brothers to write and executive produce original one-hour dramatic series. He has published poems in a variety of literary journals and his poetry is featured in Imaginative Writing, the most widely adopted creative writing text in the world. A former John Gardner Fellow in Fiction at Bread Loaf, Kingsbury Fellow at Florida State, and Walter E. Dakin Fellow at Sewanee, Matt has recently held residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. He has appeared on various media outlets including NPR, Radio France, The Discovery Channel, and MSNBC. In the past Matt worked for the Associated Press National Broadcast Office in Washington DC, as an on-air announcer and producer at a local NPR station in Virginia, and as a Steward at the British Museum in London, England. Matt served as the director of the University of Mississippi MFA program from 2020-2025, and has been teaching graduate-level creative writing classes for twenty years. He currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi.
Novels: North Country (2025)
Oleander City (2022)
The Night Swimmer (2012)
The Wettest County in the World/ Lawless (2008)
The Third Translation (2005)
Courses Taught
- ENG 199 Introduction to Creative Writing
- ENG 220 Survey in Literary History
- ENG 224 Survey of American Lit since Civil War
- ENG 302 Fiction Workshop
- ENG 304 Screenwriting Workshop
- ENG 310 Introduction to Cinema Studies
- ENG 311 Studies in Cinema/Media Genres
- ENG 343 Studies in 19th Century Literature
- ENG 351 Topics in Contemporary Literature
- ENG 352 Studies in Contemporary Literature
- ENG 395 Studies in Literature
- ENG 411 Special Topics Cinema/Media Studies
- ENG 424 Advanced Fiction Workshop
- ENG 442 Antebellum America Literature
- ENG 450 Special Topics 20 & 21st Century American Lit
- ENG 600 Intro to Graduate Study
- ENG 680 Graduate Fiction Workshop I
- ENG 683 Form, Craft, and Influence: Fiction
Education
Ph.D. Creative Writing, Florida State University (2003)