Kimberly Reyes is an award-winning poet, essayist, popular culture critic, and visual culture scholar who began her career as a music and entertainment reporter. She transitioned to creative writing after receiving her Master of Arts from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2013 and has since been awarded grants, bursaries, fellowships, residencies and scholarships from the Poetry Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the Academy of American Poets, Tin House Workshops, Culture Ireland, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, New York City Artist Corps, Miami Writers Institute, the Arts Council of Ireland, CantoMundo, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Hambidge, Cave Canem, the Napa Valley Writers' Conference, the Munster Literature Centre, Summer Literary Seminars in Kenya, the Prague Summer Program for Writers, the Community of Writers, and many other places.
Kimberly is the author of the poetry collections vanishing point. (Omnidawn 2023), Running to Stand Still (Omnidawn 2019)—finalist for the 2020 Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award and for Civil Coping Mechanisms' 2017 Mainline Competition, and Warning Coloration (dancing girl press 2018)—finalist for the Two Sylvias Press 2017 Chapbook Competition. She is the author of the essay collection Life During Wartime (Fourteen Hills 2019), winner of the 2018 Michael Rubin Prose Chapbook Award.
Her writing has been featured in/on The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Associated Press, Entertainment Weekly, Time.com, The New York Post, The Village Voice, Alternative Press, ESPN the Magazine, Jane, NY1 News, The Best American Poetry, poets.org, american poets, The Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland, Poetry London, The Stinging Fly, RTÉ Radio, The Irish Examiner, Film Ireland, RHINO, Columbia Journal, Obsidian, The Acentos Review, and The Feminist Wire, among other places. Kimberly is a Pushcart prize nominee, and her writing has been anthologized in various genres. Her work as a film critic earned her accreditation from the Motion Picture Association in 2022. She's been a Golden Globe voter since 2021.
Kimberly has taught poetry abroad at Ó Bhéal and the Munster Literature Centre in Ireland, and stateside at San Quentin State Prison, the Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois, and the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts. A Black Nuyorican, Kimberly sits on the Irish Fulbright Commission's Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Board and serves as a poetry editor for Omnidawn. She is currently a teacher and doctoral student in Creative Writing at UNL.