About
LANA REEVES was raised in Honolulu, Hawai'i. She received her B.A. with Honors from Harvard University, where she received summa cum laude on her thesis of original poetry and the Edward Eager Memorial Prize for best undergraduate creative writing. At Harvard, she was advised by former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. Reviewing her thesis manuscript, poet Stephanie Burt writes, "This remarkably various (in its forms) and consistent (in its tones and feelings) collection doesn't feel like a senior thesis: it feels like a first book… It’s that good. Lana’s that good." Second reviewer, poet Josh Bell, writes, "I’m not sure at the undergraduate level I’ve read poems of identity so troubled and distressed, restless and searching… [The poems] present still somehow a vulnerable and specific speaker in jeopardy throughout, and speaking as often as possible from that jeopardy instead of about that jeopardy."
Simultaneous to her degree at Harvard, Lana studied composition and songwriting at the Berklee College of Music. Her compositions and sonic essays integrate elements of her classical music training with spoken word and "found sounds," or new MIDI instruments created from encounters in the real world.
Following her graduation from Harvard, Lana spent a year living in Madrid studying Latin American literature. She is a graduate of the Middlebury Language School of Spanish, and she has a scholarly interest in Latin American postcolonial poetry and short stories. Her academic research is focused on the development of cross-cultural scholarship and coalitions between American-occupied island nations, including Hawai'i, Puerto Rico, Guam, Sāmoa, and the Virgin Islands. She is also interested in the survivance of traditional indigenous agriculture as a method of economic sovereignty and climate mitigation.
Lana's poems are published or forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Poetry Online, Bellingham Review, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. Her writing has been supported by the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She is currently a Harold Stirling Vanderbilt Fellow in the Vanderbilt University MFA Program in Nashville, Tennessee.