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, armed with a Zoom drum machine, a Squire guitar, and a four track, he tried his hand as a musician.

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 life 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 has released a number of albums, his most recent, Young Folks, combines elements of poetry, spoken word, and storytelling pieces set to an experimental electronic soundtrack. He co-runs a live reading and arts series, Adverse Abstraction. He hosts Grinding Teeth: A Podcast About The Creative Journey, and co-hosts Narrative Deviants: A Queer Film Podcast. He is co-founder of Really Pretty Ugly, a Philadelphia-based company which specializes in hand-dyed t-shirts and other handmade crafts.