Biography
James Reiss (born July 11, 1941) is an American poet.
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 City. From 1971-1974 he was a regular poetry critic for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1977 he won first prize in New York?s Big Apple Bicentennial Poetry Contest. He won four annual Zeitfunk awards for his reviewing, in 2007-2010, from the Public Radio Exchange.
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. ..
