Matthue Roth is a performance poet, and the author of the novels Candy in Action and Never Mind the Goldbergs, and the memoir Yom Kippur a Go-Go.
He's filmed for HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and Rock the Vote, performed with Deepak Chopra and Carlos Santana, and completed three national tours with his own brand of poetry that isn’t quite hip-hop and isn’t quite storytelling, but still manages to be funny and sweet and brutal and brutally honest. He’s lectured and performed at high schools and universities nationwide, including Yale and Harvard, and tours regularly.
You can find out about books Matthue's been published in or his performance poetry or even Matthue's science-fiction hip-hop band. Or you can just go to his secret online diary at www.matthue.com and poke around.
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And all of this comes from, perhaps, the most unlikely place of all: from the mind of a straight, twentysomething Hasidic punk-rock boy. Matthue Roth was prompted to write Candy after a friend was stalked and raped. After the incident, he says, she felt withdrawn, depressed, but most of all powerless—powerless to stop it, but also powerless to do anything else.
“This book is kind of my fantasy,” he says. “Not of what could have happened, but of how I wish we could’ve expressed ourselves. It was more a coping mechanism, a dream of what could happen in another universe…a universe where real life drops into kung-fu battles at the drop of a dime.”
Candy in Action is Matthue Roth’s take on fourth-wave feminism -- a feminism that’s going to come from the most unlikely of places.
