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Matthew Power, Wide-Roving Journalist, Dies at 39

Matthew Power, a wide-roving journalist whose writing took readers from a journey down the Mississippi with modern-day hobos to the scenes of international disasters and inside the Lower East Side apartment where Allen Ginsberg spent his last days, died on Monday in Uganda. He was 39.

He was reporting on an explorer who is walking the length of the Nile when he was overcome by the heat and died, presumably of heatstroke, his wife, Jessica Benko, said.

A contributing writer at Harper’s Magazine, Mr. Power also wrote for other publications, including GQ, The New York Times and Men’s Journal, which had sent him to Uganda. His articles were in annual anthologies like “Best American Travel Writing” and “Best American Spiritual Writing,” and he was a three-time finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists in international reporting.

For two Harper’s articles he visited the scene of incidents abroad that captured the attention of most Americans only briefly: the destruction of Buddha statues by the Taliban in 2000, and the collapse of a mammoth garbage dump in Quezon City, the Philippines, during heavy rains, leading to the deaths of hundreds of people living in shanties nearby.

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Matthew PowerCredit...Jessica Benko

“He was always searching for the human truth beneath the sorry facts,” said Roger Hodge, who edited many of Mr. Power’s articles for Harper’s and is now the editor of The Oxford American. “He wanted to live it — live what these people were living.”

Matthew John Power was born on Oct. 22, 1974, in Middlebury, Vt., and grew up in Cornwall, Vt. He attended Middlebury College. By the age of 24 he had moved to New York, garnering creative headlines (“Plant Lover Up a Tree Is Pruned By Police”) by dressing as a sunflower and climbing a tree to protest the Giuliani administration’s decision to close community gardens.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Power, who lived in Brooklyn, is survived by his mother, Jane Steele; his father, John Power; and two sisters, Julie Ruppert and Elizabeth Robison.

Mr. Power was frequently a character in his own writing, particularly in “Holy Soul,” an essay published in Heeb magazine, in which he described a teenage tryst with Mr. Ginsberg, a friend of his aunt’s, whom he had met at a family bar mitzvah. As Mr. Ginsberg was dying, Mr. Power became obsessed with creating 1,000 origami cranes for him because of “a Japanese folk legend that it would grant the recipient a wish.”

He ended the article by invoking something Mr. Ginsberg had written 30 years earlier about poetry, and how it could also be applied to the role of being alive. “ ‘And what’s the work?’ he told us. ‘Ease the pain of living.’ ”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Matthew Power, 39, Wide-Roving Journalist. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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