Matthew Brennan grew up in St. Louis and went to grad school in Minneapolis but moved to Indiana in 1985 when he joined the faculty in the English Department at Indiana State Univ. He teaches poetry writing and 19th-century literature and  composition.  He began writing poems as an undergraduate at Grinnell College.  His poems have appeared in Sewanee Review, South Dakota Review, Notre Dame Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and other journals.

His most recent book of poems is Snow in New York (Lamar U. Literary Press, 2021).  In 2016, Lamar published One Life, and in 2010 The House with the Mansard Roof (Backwaters Press, 2009), which Dana Gioia called “impressively wide-ranging” and former Poet Laureate Ted Kooser said "is a gift," was named a finalist for the Best Books of Indiana.   In 2008 Brennan published The Sea-Crossing of Saint Brendan, a book-length narrative in verse that is a version of the medieval tale in Latin prose about a Celtic monk who crosses the Atlantic.  The South Carolina Review describes this book as “highly readable” and written in “rhythmic, flowing verse.”

Brennan’s earlier collections of poems are Seeing in the Dark (1993) and The Music of Exile (1994).  He has authored four critical studies: on Wordsworth, on the gothic novel, and on the Southern antebellum poet and novelist William Gilmore Simms, and most recently The Colosseum Critical Introduction to Dana Gioia (Franciscan University Press, 2020).  He has been the recipient of two Indiana Arts Commission grants and has won the Thomas Merton Center prize for Poetry of the Sacred.