He’s been published in an ever-expanding list of prominent magazines, including The New Yorker, Poetry, and Ploughshares he’s won a Whiting Award and a Pushcart Prize, a NEA Fellowship, scholarships to prestigious writing residencies, and an invitation to join the Harvard Radcliffe Institute as the Suzanne Young Murray Fellow in fiction and poetry.īut growing up in Mount Holly, New Jersey - “corn and cow farms,” Reeves says - being a full-time writer wasn’t considered a possible career. His early experiences with poetry as play, as making, and as a sound that moves people to change still shape Reeves’ work, and that work is earning him more and more recognition. But Reeves also talks about what it means to be human - and maybe something better, something beyond. Over coffee and Orangina, he talks about writing, about the mentors who have shaped his work, about his understanding of himself as a writer and poet. When I meet Reeves, it’s already a hot day in Austin and getting hotter. ![]() It was a Pentecostal church, so it was all about sound and the way in which sound changes a person’s spirit, changes how they’re feeling.” “Exegetical readings, learning how to read a text and think about a text, those were really, really important. “It all really began with the church and sermons and reading the King James version of the Bible and growing up with my mother as a Sunday school teacher,” says Reeves, an associate professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin. But even before he was writing poems, Reeves was learning how to be a poet. He remembers it as a kind of play he enjoyed making all sorts of things, building contraptions out of cardboard and magnets, and poetry was just another way to create. They began as acrostics, written and illustrated as gifts to his friends in lieu of the birthday presents his family couldn’t afford. Roger Reeves has been writing poems since he was six years old. Poet Roger Reeves ponders history, loss, joy, and the bright side of barbarism
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