Malevolent Volume

Justin Phillip Reed is an American poet and essayist. He is the author of Indecency (Coffee House Press), winner of the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry and Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and a finalist for the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He is the 2019-2021 Fellow in Creative Writing at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. His work appears in African American Review, Denver Quarterly, Guernica, the New Republic, Obsidian, and elsewhere. He earned his BA in creative writing at Tusculum College and his MFA in poetry at Washington University in St. Louis. He has received fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Conversation Literary Festival, and the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis. He was born and raised in South Carolina.

Praise for The Malevolent VolumeWinner of the 2021 CLMP Firecracker Award in PoetryFinalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award in Gay PoetryA Washington Post Best Poetry Collection of 2020An NPR Favorite Book of 2020A New York Times New and Noteworthy Book“Reed blends intersectional politics and bodily hunger in precise, thorny language.” —The New York Times“Reminds us that poetry can be playful and deadly serious in the same moment. . . . [Reed] piles on anxious images and quasi-logical connections to create a gratifying weirdness.” —Troy Jollimore, The Washington Post"A dextrous and epic music, this book faces down our combative and trespassed American moment. . . . Justin Phillip Reed has written a book that beckons us to reread as we seek to understand our time, how much of it is promissory and how much apocalyptic.” —Judges' citation, 2021 Firecracker Award in Poetry“[M]agnificent. . . . The gorgeous precision of the poems refuse to perform for the white gaze—they snatch back blackness from being used as a trope, crafting instead a new canon.” —Erin Adair-Hodges, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch“Incendiary. With breathtaking lyrical dexterity, Reed first rebukes and then remakes western literature and myth, bringing Black queerness to the forefront.” —Luiza Flynn-Goodlett, Adroit“A tour-de-force featuring a striking voice and artistry that will dazzle the vision, stun the ear, and demand attention.” —Mandana Chaffa, Jacket2“Reed is making a new and wholly irreducible line through the waters of American poetry.” —Terrance Hayes“The beast in me bows to the beast in you, Justin. This is a restorative Black eco-poetics; where afropessimism meets afrofuturism.” —Marwa Helal“Reed is a master of many things—meter, momentum, lexical richness, the musculature of syntax, how to haunt an insistently violent canon—but perhaps chief among them is the dark magic of harnessing language’s wilds into something that blooms into a real shout inside you." —Franny Choi