Paul Reyes

Biography

Paul Reyes is VQR’s Editor and is the author of Exiles in Eden: Life Among the Ruins of Florida’s Great Recession. He has published several articles in VQR, including “Opportunity Knocks,” his essay about the Miami organization Take Back the Land, which was a finalist for a Harry Chapin Media Award. His writing—which has also appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, LitHub, and the Oxford American—has earned him a nomination for a National Magazine Award in Feature Writing as well as a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

See Work

EDITOR'S DESK / Spring 2024

Principles of Bonding

By Paul Reyes

With her essay “Social Distortions,” Laura Kolbe wraps up a brief but impressive run as a columnist for this magazine: six installments that brought more than three dozen works—from film to textiles to sculpture—to bear on essays that are...

EDITOR'S DESK / Winter 2023

Meeting the Privilege

By Paul Reyes

This issue continues a run of powerful photodocumentary work for VQR, beginning with Michael O. Snyder’s narrative portrait of drag-queen culture in a northern Appalachian town in the 2023 Spring/Summer double issue, followed in the Fall by...
EDITOR'S DESK / Fall 2023

The Health-Care Castle

By Paul Reyes

My son suffered a gruesome injury at the beginning of summer—on the last day of school, just a few minutes before I picked him up from a get-together with his rat pack of middle-school pals. Tag in the woods behind the house, night coming...

EDITOR'S DESK / Spring/Summer 2023

Fresh Storylines

By Paul Reyes

“The Queens of Queen City” is photographer Michael Snyder’s immersive photodocumentary, nearly a decade in the making, of the drag community of Cumberland, Maryland, in northern Appalachia. Just a few images into it, I was struck by what...
INTERVIEWS

Guerrilla Scholarship: Shop Talk with Jim Coan

By Paul Reyes

VQR columnist and neuroscientist Jim Coan’s comic-styled column Drawing It Out asks the human questions at the heart of scientific inquiry.

EDITOR'S DESK / Winter 2022

Moonlighting

By Paul Reyes

For all the intentionality behind each issue of VQR, there are plenty of accidents and unexpected outcomes that happen along the way. Half of them are lucky; the rest we wrestle with until they fit the larger puzzle. Every magazine...
EDITOR'S DESK / Fall 2022

War Stories

By Paul Reyes

The laws of war make for a brittle pact at best, and can seem like a tragic fallacy up against an army’s nihilistic impulses. Russia’s tactics in Ukraine prove as much: atrocities in Bucha; the bombing of a maternity hospital in Kharkiv...
EDITOR'S DESK / Summer 2022

Ways of Attention

By Paul Reyes

Joy seems hard to sustain these days if you’re paying close enough attention to the world around you. A somber mood with which to kick off a Summer Fiction issue, but it lands amid crises both familiar and new.
EDITOR'S DESK / Spring 2022

Push Factors

By Paul Reyes

By the time we finalized the layout for Ara Oshagan’s photo essay about the Armenian diaspora in Lebanon, his decade-long project comprising memoir and documentary, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was underway, with horrific consequences.

EDITOR'S DESK / Winter 2021

Metaversal Truths

By Paul Reyes

I made it about halfway through Meta’s promotional video for its metaverse project before quitting, a little shaken by the misanthropic future it promised.