Matt Howard is the recipient of the 2024/2025 YSP/Laureate Fund Residency supported by the T. S. Eliot Foundation, which has been made possible by YSP Trustee and Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage.

Matt will use the residency to spend time exploring YSP’s natural landscape. He is interested in mapping the bird species at the Park and forming these findings into a third collection of poems.

Matt is manager of the University of Leeds Poetry Centre. His first collection, Gall, was published by The Rialto in 2018 and was winner of the 2018 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry, shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Prize in 2019, and won Best First Collection in the inaugural Laurel Prize 2020. After eleven years working for the RSPB, Matt was Douglas Caster Fellow in Poetry at the University of Leeds from 2021-2023. His second collection, Broadlands, is published by Bloodaxe.