Congratulations to Justin Phillip Reed on receiving a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship!
Reed is one of five young poets awarded the prestigious fellowship this year, including Franny Choi, Jane Huffman, José Olivarez, and Michael Wasson.
Established in 1989 by Ruth Lilly to encourage the further writing and study of poetry, the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Poetry Fellowship program has dramatically expanded since its inception. Until 1995, university writing programs nationwide each nominated one student poet for a single fellowship; from 1996 until 2007, two fellowships were awarded. In 2008 the competition was opened to all U.S. poets between 21 and 31 years of age, and the number of fellowships increased to five, totaling $75,000. In 2013, the Poetry Foundation received a generous gift from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund to create the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships, which increased the fellowship amount from $15,000 to $25,800. Last year, Coffee House Press was proud that Hieu Minh Nguyen, author of Not Here, was awarded a 2018 Ruth Lilly Fellowship.
Justin Phillip Reed’s first book, Indecency, won the 2018 National Book Award, the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and was a finalist for the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Coffee House Press will release Reed’s second collection, The Malevolent Volume, on April 4, 2020.
"[Reed’s] poems take up the body in desire and violence, and they do so by thrusting the reader into a stark visceral encounter with their material." —The New York Times
Reed is an American poet living in Pittsburgh. His work appears in African American Review, Best American Essays, Callaloo, the Kenyon Review, Obsidian, and elsewhere. He holds a BA in creative writing from Tusculum College and an MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis. The author of the chapbook A History of Flamboyance (YesYes Books 2016), he has received fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation and the Conversation Literary Festival. Reed currently organizes the St. Louis community-based poetry workshop series Most Folks At Work. He was born and raised in South Carolina.
Contact publicist Daley Farr with questions or requests: daley@coffeehousepress.org, 612-338-0125