Lewis Center Past Fellows

Roger Reeves

Roger Reeves headshot

Poet Roger Reeves. Photo by Julio Jimenez

About

Roger Reeves's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Tin House, among others. Kim Addonizio selected his poem, "Kletic of Walt Whitman," for the Best New Poets 2009 anthology. He was awarded a 2013 NEA Fellowship, a 2013 Pushcart Prize, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship by the Poetry Foundation in 2008, two Bread Loaf Scholarships, an Alberta H. Walker Scholarship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and two Cave Canem Fellowships. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and is currently an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His first book, King Me, has just been published by Copper Canyon Press. As a Hodder Fellow, he will continue work on The Last American Minstrel, a collection of poems that appropriates minstrel songs and iconography, vernacular and folk traditions, and African-American hand jive (known as "juba patting" or "hambone") as a means of querying and exploring American notions of pleasure and spectacle. His book will revisit both slavery and these nineteenth-century forms of entertainment as a means of writing a labor history of the nineteenth century via sound and lyric.

Links

Books
“King Me” at Copper Canyon Press

Poems
“Cymothoe Exigue” and “The Mare of Money” at The Poetry Foundation
“Romanticism (The Blue Keats)” in The Paris American
“On Paradise” from PEN Poetry Series

Articles
“What Black Poets are Doing to Poetry” at Poetry Society of America

Interviews
“Talking with Roger Reeves: A Pawn, a Poet, a King” by Ru Freeman on Huffington Post