UIC poet awarded Pushcart Prize
Roger Reeves
A University of Illinois at Chicago poet has been named a recipient of the prestigious Pushcart Prize.
Roger Reeves, assistant professor of English, is among more than 60 award recipients chosen for the literary honor from thousands of nominations of poetry, short fiction and essays published by small literary magazines or small presses around the world.
Reeves was selected for his poem “The Field Museum,” which originally appeared in the Winter 2013 issue of The Cincinnati Review.
The winners’ works are published annually in an anthology of stories, poems, essays and memoirs. The latest edition, “Pushcart Prize XXXVIII: Best of the Small Presses,” is scheduled to be released later this year.
In 2012, Reeves was one of 40 recipients of a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing grant for outstanding poets. He is using the $25,000 award to investigate the Rock Springs Massacre, an 1885 racial labor riot in Wyoming, when white miners killed 28 Chinese miners over wages and other issues.
Reeves also is working on a collection of sonnets that deal with the emotional and intellectual legacy of lynching.
His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, and the Cincinnati Review, among others. His poem “Kletic of Walt Whitman” was selected in 2009 for Best New Poets, an annual anthology of 50 poems from emerging writers.
UIC ranks among the nation’s leading research universities and is Chicago’s largest university with 27,500 students, 12,000 faculty and staff, 15 colleges and the state’s major public medical center. A hallmark of the campus is the Great Cities Commitment, through which UIC faculty, students and staff engage with community, corporate, foundation and government partners to improve the quality of life in metropolitan areas around the world.
