About
LANA REEVES is from O'ahu, 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.
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Simultaneous to her Harvard degree, 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 literature in Spanish. She is a graduate of the Middlebury Language School, and she has a scholarly interest in Caribbean poetry and theory.
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Her academic and archival research is focused on the oral histories and songs of sugarcane plantations, centered in Hawai'i in the late 1800s, but extending to other areas of the Pacific, even as far as Queensland, Australia.
Her recent historical poetry stems from an attempt to document the musical and poetic forms used to keep time, share information, and subvert power on sugarcane plantations, songs which in Hawai'i were called holehole bushi. She hopes to make connections between this and other musical, poetic forms that emerge from communities of island plantations, including the Caribbean musical genres of dub and reggae, which have cross-cultural echoes in Hawai'i. Her methodologies include literary analysis and criticism, ethnomusicology, and theory from Asian American studies and postcolonial studies.
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Lana's poems are published or forthcoming in The Atlantic, Beloit Poetry Journal, Gulf Coast Journal, Meridian, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 49th Parallel Award in Poetry, and was named a finalist for the Iowa Review Award and the Ploughshares Emerging Writers' Contest. She is a Kundiman Fellow, and her work has been supported by the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She is currently a Harold Stirling Vanderbilt Fellow at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where she teaches. Her debut poetry collection is forthcoming from Penguin in 2027.
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Lana is represented by Noelle Falcis Math at Transatlantic Literary Agency.