On Thursday, September 22, the Center for Writing and Creative Expression launched its ’22–’23 Soul in the City event series by welcoming the award-winning poet Roger Reeves to campus for a reading and book-signing. Reeves shared works from his most recent collection, Best Barbarian, which was long-listed for the National Book Award in September.
Roger Reeves is the author of King Me and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a 2015 Whiting Award, among other honors. His work has appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Austin, Texas.
“Roger’s poetry offers equal measures of darkness and light, of agony and ecstasy, of catastrophe and joy — sometimes within the space of a single phrase — which is what makes his work so exquisite and so true,” says Dr. Claire Colombo, who hosted the event along with MSF senior Carla Burzyk and MDiv junior Tina Francis Mutungu. “It was a gift and an honor to have him among us.”
Reeves read from his recent collection and shared coffee and dessert with the Southwest community.
