James Reiss (pronounced "Reese") grew up in the Washington Heights section of New York City and in northern New Jersey. He earned his B.A. and his M.A. in English from the University of Chicago.
His poems have appeared in various magazines, including The Atlantic, Esquire, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Poetry, Slate and Virginia Quarterly Review.
He has won grants from the Creative Artists Public Service Program of the New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts. the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. He has received awards from, among others, the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, the Pushcart Press and the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in New York. He won three annual Zeitfunk awards, in 2007-2009, from the Public Radio Exchange for his reviewing. From 1971 through 1974 he was a regular poetry critic for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio. Since May 2009 he has been a regular book reviewer for Gently Read Literature. In 2010 he began reviewing for Rain Taxi.
In 1975-76 he taught as poet-in-residence at Queens College, CUNY.
He is Emeritus Professor of English and Founding Editor of Miami University Press at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where his students, among others, were Rita Dove and Adrienne Miller.
He has two married daughters, Heather and Crystal by his first wife, Barbara Eve Miller (née Klevs). His second wife, Mary Jo McMillin, wrote Mary Jo’s Cuisine: A Cookbook (2007). He lives in the Chicago area.
Helen VendlerThe New York Times Book Review, April 6, 1975: “In Reiss, poems are laid in drawers, folded in books; memories are like pictures cut out of magazines, inertia and insomnia are the two forms of life. Pursued by the same phantoms, which reappear on the telephone, in sequential rooms, in snapshots, in slides, Reiss writes them down in an accomplished plain style, with a momentum carrying whole poems along on the humming acceleration of a single sentence. . . . Reiss has the indispensable gift of rhythm, and that, combined with his compulsive subject, makes a very good beginning.”
The New York Times Book Review, Summer Reading 1975, June 1, 1975: The Breathers. "Unusually good first book."
Peter MeinkeThe New Republic, June 14, 1975: “All in all, this is an impressive first book, solid rather than flashy; although these poems do not make grand pronouncements they have as their source what Howard Nemerov called ‘great primary human drama,’ and they are always interesting and often moving.”
Richard HowardThe Ohio Review, Winter 1975: “What is creative, Keats observed, must create itself; James Reiss goes about it so attractively that we are beguiled, almost, into forgetting the scandal, the labor, the pain of the negative in this first book of poems. He has inspected the nostalgias, he has scoured the horizon of reminiscence, and so ingeniously has he repeated his findings, his losses, that it is not until about half way through the book that the realization dawns...‘where the sky blooms like a dark rose’...that this is all one poem, one life. . . . “
Dulcy BrainardPublishers Weekly, February 26, 1996: “From the dark ruminations of ‘Castrati in Caesar’s Court’. . .and ‘Memorial Quilt, Central Park’. . .to the hard-boiled nostalgia of ‘Mexico’. . .Reiss imagines himself into situations rich with the bitterness of loss or deprivation. The volume concludes on a positive note, however, with one of Reiss’s best poems, ‘Eclipse the Dark/ My Fiftieth Birthday: July 11, 1941,’ in which his fear of aging and death is transformed into a celebration of ‘the light which surrounds us / and comes from within us’...a conclusion that confirms the close attention Reiss pays the world in even the collection’s darkest explorations.”
