Roger Reeves

Biography

Roger Reeves is the author of two poetry collections, King Me (Copper Canyon, 2013) and Best Barbarian (Norton, 2022),  a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the 2023 Kingsley Tufts Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize. His first book of nonfiction, Dark Days:Fugitive Essays (Graywolf, 2023), was a finalist for the 2024 Pegasus Award in Poetry Criticism. His poems and essays have been published in journals including the New Yorker, the Paris Review, American Poetry Review, the Yale Review, and others. 

See Work

ESSAYS / Spring/Summer 2023

Notes on the Underground

By Roger Reeves ,  Illustration by Michael Paul Britto

Toward a New Black Solidarity
POETRY / Spring 2022

Drapetomania, or James Baldwin as Improvisation

By Roger Reeves

Absent bounty, anarchic and asymptotic, / Bedlam banked as beauty, captive cuckolding / Capital and its camel-faced captor, master, the / Devil is in the dove’s details

POETRY / Spring 2022

The Alphabet, for Naima

By Roger Reeves

A is for almost, arriving, my father’s death. / B is for bear, which he does and does not do. / C is for care and critics and leaving them to their caskets.