Erik Reece

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Erik Reece is a lecturer at the University of Kentucky, teaching environmental journalism, writing, and literature.

Reece was born & bred in Louisville, Kentucky. He has two degrees from the University of Kentucky, where he studied with Guy Davenport. His first book-length prose was a companion essay to Davenport's collection of his drawings and paintings, A Balance of Quinces. Before that, he published a collection of poems, My Muse Was Supposed to Meet Me Here.

Reece's 2006 book Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness (Riverhead Books), with photos by John J. Cox and a foreword by Wendell Berry, observes the effects mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia from October 2003 through November 2004.

An excerpt of Reece's book, the essay "Death of a Mountain," was printed in the April 2005 edition of Harper's Magazine, and another excerpt appeared in The Nation in February 2006.

In 2006, he received the Sierra Club's David R. Brower Award for Environmental Journalism. Reece also received the John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism from the Columbia University School of Journalism for his essay "Death of a Mountain."