William Proctor Matthews, III, was born November 11, 1942, in Cincinnati, Ohio. He received his B.A. degree from Yale University in 1965 and his M.A. degree from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in 1966. In 1963, he married Marie Harris, an author and poet, whose papers are also housed at the Lilly Library. They have two sons, William IV and Sebastian. The marriage ended in divorce in 1974. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Matthews co-edited the magazine Lillabulero. Matthews also served as the vice-president of the board of directors of the Associated Writers Program as well as chairman of the literature panel of the National Endowment for the Arts. At the time of his death, on November 12, 1997, he was a professor of English and director of the creative writing program at City College of New York. In 1997, he was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.