Slow Boat to Samoa by Matthew Caretti

Matthew began his teaching career and expat adventures in 1995 while on a Princeton-in-Asia fellowship at Yeungnam University in Gyeongsan, Republic of Korea. Following those first days in the classroom, Matthew taught English at Mercersburg Academy for thirteen years, where he also served as the Director of the Writing Center. After leaving that post in 2015, Matthew practiced Zen at the Seo-un Hermitage, a small monastery near Yangsan, Korea. Thereafter, he engaged in a yearlong pilgrimage through South Asia before returning to Africa, where he had lived and worked as a Peace Corps Volunteer (2003-05) and topped the general classification in the 2006 Tour d’ Afrique, a bicycle race from Cairo, Egypt, to Cape Town, South Africa. In 2017, he was named principal at Amitofo Care Centre, an orphanage and school for five hundred children in Blantyre, Malawi, and a year later as director of the same NGO’s center in Mafeteng, Lesotho. Matthew eventually returned to the classroom to teach English in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, and now leads a simple life in Pago Pago, American Samoa.  He earned a BS in Business and German at Susquehanna University in 1991 and four years later his MA in English at Shippensburg University, both located in his home state of Pennsylvania.

Matthew has engaged deep contemplation about the human condition during periods of both retreat and pilgrimage, and cultivates those same musings in his writing. He has been influenced in equal parts by his study of German language and literature, by the approach of the Beat writers, by his travels and his monastic training. His collections include Harvesting Stones (2017, winner of the Snapshot Press eChapbook Award), Africa, Buddha (2022, Red Moon Press) and Ukulele Drift: Poems from a Small Island (2023, Red Moon Press) and Slow Boat to Samoa, just released by Red Moon Press. His poems appear regularly in Cattails, contemporary haibun online, Drifting Sands Haibun, Frogpond, Hedgerow, Kingfisher, Modern Haiku and several other journals. He has won a number of awards since he began to publish his work, most notably the 2024 Touchstone Award for his haibun “Deep Water Port.”