San Antonio Book Festival - Roger Reeves
Ana Schwartz
Book Festival Author

Roger Reeves

Roger Reeves is the author of the poetry collections King Me and Best Barbarian, which was a National Book Award Finalist for Poetry. He is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Whiting Award, and Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard University. His essays and poems have appeared in Poetry, New Yorker, Granta, Yale Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Austin, Texas. His latest work is Dark Days: Fugitive Essays.

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Book by Roger Reeves

  •  Dark Days: Fugitive Essays by Roger Reeves

    Dark Days: Fugitive Essays

    In his debut work of nonfiction, award-winning poet Roger Reeves finds new meaning in silence, protest, fugitivity, freedom, and ecstasy. Braiding memoir, theory, and criticism, Reeves juxtaposes the images of an opera singer breaking the state-mandated silence curfew by singing out into the streets of Santiago, Chile, and a father teaching his daughter to laugh out loud at the planes dropping bombs on them in Aleppo, Syria. He describes the history of the hush harbor—places where enslaved people could steal away to find silence and court ecstasy, to the side of their impossible conditions. In other essays, Reeves highlights a chapter in Toni Morrison’s Beloved to locate common purpose between Black and Indigenous peoples; he visits the realities of enslaved people on McLeod Plantation, where some of the descendants of those formerly enslaved lived into the 1990s; and he explores his own family history, his learning to read closely through the Pentecostal church tradition, and his passing on of reading as a pleasure, freedom, and solace to his daughter, who is frightened the police will gun them down.


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