at gmail dot com
The Fifth Wound
Unsex Me Here
Seven Come Eleven
C.V.
Excerpts
New Essay:
“The Prime of Miss Destiny,”
On John Rechy’s City of Night.
Read here.
CURRICULUM VITAE
Aurora Mattia was born in Hong Kong and raised in Texas, where her mother was born. NIGHTBOAT BOOKS published her first book, THE FIFTH WOUND, in 2023, and her second UNSEX ME HERE, in 2025. Her writing has appeared in BOMB, ZOETROPE: ALL-STORY, JOYLAND and elsewhere, and also in exhibitions at the RISD Museum and the Renaissance Society, accompanying portraits by Elle Pérez. She just finished a new novel called SEVEN COME ELEVEN, forthcoming from Nightboat in January 2028.
INSTAGRAM
NIGHTBOAT
“A Trans Woman’s Shapeshifting Love Story,” with CHRIST, Electric Literature, 2023.
“Writer Aurora Mattia on Telling Your Own Story,” with Lindsey Lerman, The Creative Independent, 2023.
“Aurora Mattia by Madeleine Crum,” BOMB Magazine, 2023.
“Ten Questions for Aurora Mattia,” Poets & Writers, 2023.
“Observer’s Slambook,” with Erin Taylor, Observer, 2022.
“The Revelation of the Seed,” with Jordan Cutler-Tietjen, Yale Literary Magazine, 2020.
Publications:
“The Prime of Miss Destiny,” The Rearview, 2026.
“Star-Crossed,” PICNIC Magazine, 2026.
“I’ve Never Known a Man Who Loved Me,” PICNIC Magazine, 2025.
“Wild and Blue,” BOMB Magazine, 2025.
“Valentine’s Day,” Joyland, 2024.
“RE: What Happened to the Avant-Garde,” The Drift, 2023.
“Via Crucis,” Zoetrope: All-Story, 2020.
“Ezekiel in the Snow,” Prairie Schooner, 2018.
Teaching Experience:
“Body Chronicles,” intensive craft workshop via Pacific University’s MFA (2025): on the creative utility of literary ‘supercuts’—— writing the same scene in the form of a news segment, bar bathroom gossip, a police report, a memoiristic reflection and a prayer, then creating a ‘supercut’ composed only from lines and phrases in the separate pieces, in order to explore the possibilities and limitations of form.
“Traversing Genre,” AWP panel (2026): on how far the rules of fiction can be pushed toward the kaleidoscopic opacity of poetry before it becomes another genre entirely, and the effect of such a disruption on the temporal linearity of grammar.
“Early Modern Trans Sudies 4,” guest lecture at Queens College conference (2026): on the creative possibilities afforded by writing in Middle English, and on the subject of recuperating historical figures, particularly gender non-conforming figures, in contemporary writing and thought——researching buried histories to imagine possible futures.
“Trans Studies at the Commons,” keynote lecture and intensive workshop at University of Kansas (2026): on the subject of automythography, how aspects of magical realism can be integrated into autofiction by trans authors in order to communicate a spiritual reality within and among the unavoidable facts of the everyday.