[1][2] Apart from her professorship at Bryn Mawr, Matthews is a visiting professor and scholar at the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University.

There she helped to develop the Poets and Scholars Summer Writing Retreat and the “Race, In Theory” Fellows Humanities Seminar.

[10] In January 2022, Matthews was chosen as the sixth Poet Laureate of Philadelphia for the 2022–2023 term.

[11] In 2016, she won the Yale Younger Poet award, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from the 2016 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

In 2024 she received a PEN Oakland – Josephine Miles Award for Bread and Circus.