[1][2] She is from Los Angeles, California, the daughter of abstract painter Francine Matarazzo, and John H. Schumann, a professor of applied linguistics.
She earned her BA degree from Yale University, where she received the Wallace Prize for fiction writing, and the Arthur Willis Colton Scholarship.
Earning her MFA degree from University of California, Irvine, she was the recipient of the Dorothy and Donald Strauss Endowed Thesis Fellowship.
Matarazzo's works have been published in Faultline, Hobart, Fivechapters,[3] and several other literary journals,[4] and she has taught at UCLA Extension Writers' Program.
[5] She is an assistant professor in the MFA Writing Program at Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, and is at work on a novel.[when?]