Zell Visiting Writers Series: Reading and Q&A with Poet Roger Reeves

More About Roger Reeves

Roger Reeves’s most recent book is Dark Days: Fugitive Essays (Graywolf Press, 2024), winner ofthe GLCA New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction and a finalist for the 2024 Pegasus Award in Poetry Criticism. He is also the author of Best Barbarian (W.W. Norton & Co., 2022), a finalist

for the National Book Award and winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Tracy K. Smith called it “a revelation and a form of reparation.” His debut collection is King Me (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), a Library Journal Best Poetry Book of the year, and winner of the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, and a John C. Zacharis First Book Award.

His poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Tin House, among others. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard University, a Whiting Award, an NEA Fellowship, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, two Bread Loaf Scholarships, an Alberta H. Walker Scholarship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and two Cave Canem Fellowships.

He earned a BA in English from Morehouse College, an MA in English from Texas A&M University, an MFA from the James A. Michener Center for Creative Writing at the University of Texas at Austin, and a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently an associate professor of English and creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin.