Lit Fridays

Roger Reeves is the author of Best Barbarian (W.W. Norton & Co., 2022), which Tracy K. Smith called “a revelation and a form of reparation,” and 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 was awarded a 2013 NEA Fellowship, Ruth Lilly Fellowship by the Poetry Foundation in 2008, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, two Bread Loaf Scholarships, an Alberta H. Walker Scholarship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, two Cave Canem Fellowships and a Whiting Award.

Asked by Ru Freeman in the Huffington Post if he felt there was a particular universality in his work, Reeves responded, “No, I don’t believe my work is particularly universal. I don’t agree or believe in the universal. Many critics have argued this point so I will only say this: often, when we use the term universal, we secretly and not-so secretly mean white and white cultural epistemes. That’s why I resist the term.”

He earned a B.A. in English from Morehouse College, an M.A. 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 Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and an associate professor of English and creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin.