matt gahler was born in 1983. He was raised in a small town in Minnesota. An avid reader from a young age, he always knew he wanted to write. After discovering punk rock his freshman year of high school, he briefly tried his hand as a musician, though he quickly realized he had no musical talent.

In 2001, he moved to Uptown Minneapolis where he lived for four years. He studied cosmology at the Aveda Institute and worked for a few years as a hair stylist. Finding this work unfulfilling, he left the profession and the midwest, and moved to New York City in 2005.

He spent the first decade in New York working as a barista and writing in his spare time. He decided to enroll at CUNY to seriously study writing, where he received his Bachelor’s in English in 2017. He was immediately accepted into the MFA program at City College of New York.

Originally intending to study fiction, particularly short stories, he was encouraged to take a poetry workshop. This workshop led to another and so on until he shifted his focus from fiction to poetry. He received his MFA in 2020.

Currently, he works as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at a variety of universities around New York City. He also co-runs a live reading and arts series, Adverse Abstraction, and hosts a podcast, Grinding Teeth.