Subscribe to our newsletter
National Book Foundation > Author > Spencer Reece
Spencer Reece is an Episcopal priest. His first poetry collection, The Clerk’s Tale, won the Bakeless Prize in 2003. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Guggenheim fellowship, the Witter Bynner Prize from the Library of Congress, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship. His poems have been published inThe New Yorker, Poetry, The American Scholar, and The New Republic. Last year, he served as the chaplain to the Bishop of Spain for the Reformed Episcopal Church, La Iglesia Española Reformada Episcopal. Currently he is completing a book of prose, The Little Entrance, about his decision to become a priest in middle age. More about this author >
Reece’s central figure in The Road to Emmaus is a middle-aged man who becomes a priest in the Episcopal Church; these poems follow him to New York City, to Honduras, to a hospital where he works as a chaplain, to a prison, to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. With language of simple, lyrical beauty that gradually accrues weight and momentum, Reece spins compelling dramas out of small moments in this sequence of narrative poems. More about this book >
Spencer Reece is an Episcopal priest. His first poetry collection, The Clerk’s Tale, won the Bakeless Prize in 2003. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Guggenheim fellowship, the Witter Bynner Prize from the Library of Congress, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship. His poems have been published inThe New Yorker, Poetry, The American Scholar, and The New Republic. Last year, he served as the chaplain to the Bishop of Spain for the Reformed Episcopal Church, La Iglesia Española Reformada Episcopal. Currently he is completing a book of prose, The Little Entrance, about his decision to become a priest in middle age.