Episcopal priest, poet receives award for ‘demonstrated consistent excellence’ in writing

[Episcopal News Service] Episcopal priest and poet the Rev. Spencer Reese last week was awarded the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The award, which comes with a prize of $20,000, is given every two years to recognize a midcareer writer whose contributions to American literature have demonstrated consistent excellence. It was established by Updike’s widow, Martha.

Reese is the vicar of St. Paul’s in Wickford, Rhode Island, where he has served since late 2022.

The American Academy of Arts and Letters is a 300-member honor society whose goal is to “foster, assist and sustain excellence” in American literature, music and art. It is congressionally chartered, and it’s headquartered in New York.

Reese told Episcopal News Service that when he got the email on March 6 telling him of the award, it came as a shock. “I kind of couldn’t believe it for a day or two,” he said. But, he added, “Being involved in a community of writers means a lot to me.”

This isn’t the only award Reece has received for his work. His first book of poems, “The Clerk’s Tale,” written in 2004 when he was 41, received the Bread Loaf Writers Conference Bakeless Poetry Prize. Many of the poems draw on his previous career as an assistant manager for Brooks Brothers.

After the book was published, The New Yorker devoted an entire page to its opening poem, which later served as the basis for a 2010 film by actor and director James Franco that debuted at a section of the Cannes Film Festival.

He has written two other books of poetry – “The Road to Emmaus” in 2013 and “Acts,” which he finished earlier this year and will be published in May.

In addition to writing his own poetry, in 2017 he edited an anthology of poems, “Counting Time Like People Count Stars,” written by girls at Our Little Roses, an Episcopal-affiliated orphanage in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, where Reese taught poetry for two years. It was the basis for the documentary “Voices Beyond the Wall: 12 Love Poems from the Murder Capital of the World.”

In 2021 he published two works – a book of watercolors, “All the Beauty Still Left: A Poet’s Painted Book of Hours,” and a memoir, “The Secret Gospel of Mark.” The latter was a longlist nominee for the National Book Award.

He has received a variety of other honors, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, grants from the Fulbright Foundation and the Minnesota State Arts Council, a Witter Bynner fellowship from the Library of Congress, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and a Whiting Writers’ Award.

Reese was ordained a priest in 2011 and has served in Spain and New York City in addition to his work in Honduras and Rhode Island.

When asked about overlap in his roles as priest and poet, he said that while poetry and sermon preparation are done mostly in isolation, sermons are different in that they appear in the public setting of worship. But in both instances, they are about how those words interact with their audience.

He also said that in recent years he has found his sermons and the research he does in writing them spilling over more into his poems.

Calling poetry his “great passion and great love,” Reese said that after the initial recognition that came his way two decades ago, he had begun to feel that the doors to the literary world had mostly closed to him. Getting word of the John Updike award left him not only surprised but “encouraged about my writing life.”

As if to validate that encouragement, he learned on March 10 that The New Yorker had picked up one of his poems – the first one since his initial appearance in the magazine in 2004.

— Melodie Woerman is an Episcopal News Service freelance reporter based in Kansas.