USC English professor Michele Reese is savoring the moment.

“I’ve been writing practically my entire life: I went to a Montessori school and we worked on poetry in kindergarten. My first published poem was when I was in the seventh grade,” said Reese, who joined the USC Sumter faculty in 2002.

“When I went to college, I initially thought I would be a journalist and a poet. At the University of Southern California, I double-majored in English and print journalism. Journalism, while enjoyable, took too much time away from poetry.”

Reese’s next educational move was to get an M.A. in English, Creative Writing-Poetry, at the University of Southern Mississippi. Then it was on to the University of Missouri in Columbia for a Ph.D.

Her connection with The Paris Review began there, in the fall of 1999. She met Richard Howard, the poetry editor for The Paris Review, while he was at the University for a brief writer’s residency. He took a fancy to Reese’s poem about mangoes, titled “Fruit.”

“Richard really like the poem, but he wanted to see some changes to it,” Reese said. “I worked on it and then submitted it to him.” She later sent a second poem, “Migrations,” and was told both poems would appear in an upcoming issue.

Three years later—after she had earned the Ph.D., taught at Auburn University for a year, and settled into a faculty position at USC Sumter—Reese got word that both her poems would appear in the Summer 2003 issue of The Paris Review.

Reese was elated, and with good reason. Each year, The Paris Review receives more than 20,000 submissions of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry; only about 10 to 15 are published in each issue. The Paris Review publishes four issues a year—an issue for each season— and its contributors are an amalgamation of both literary giants and up-and-coming young writers. The works of Jack Kerouac, Philip Roth, E.L. Doctorow, William Faulkner, Ezra Pound, and Henry Miller have all appeared in the magazine.

At USC Sumter, Reese teaches the composition sequences, world literature, and creative writing. She is the faculty advisor for the campus’s student-run and -written literary magazine, Sandhill. She also directs the Poetry in the Schools program at Bates Middle School in Sumter.

Reese has also completed a book, which she hopes to publish soon. Now that her work has appeared in The Paris Review, she reasons, editors may look more carefully at her poems.


11/03