Roger Reeves

Roger Reeves is an American poet whose collection Best Barbarian (2022) won the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2023. The collection is a searingly beautiful meditation on the Black experience in America, drawing on mythology, history, and the lyric tradition to articulate a vision of Black life that refuses to be defined solely by suffering. Reeves's debut collection King Me (2013) was widely praised and won the Larry Levis Prize and other awards. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University. Best Barbarian was the winner of the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and a finalist for numerous other prizes. Reeves is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. His poetry is known for its formal range, its mythological resonance, and its capacity to hold together beauty and violence within the same breath.