Photograph of Justin Philip Reed

Poet and essayist Justin Phillip Reed was born and raised in South Carolina. He earned his BA from Tusculum College and an MFA from Washington University, where he was also Junior Writer-in-Residence. Reed is the author of the poetry collections The Malevolent Volume (Coffee House Press, forthcoming Spring 2020) and Indecency (Coffee House Press, 2018), winner of the National Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. His chapbook is A History of Flamboyance (YesYes Books, 2016). His work has appeared in African American Review, Best American Essays, Callaloo Kenyon Review, Obsidian, and elsewhere. In 2019 he was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, the Conversation Literary Festival, and the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis, Reed currently lives in St. Louis.