Rita Mae Reese

Rita Mae Reese grew up in Charleston, West Virginia. She was the first person in her family to attend college but dropped out after a few semesters and went to work for a lesbian press in Florida. After working there for nearly seven years, she was persuaded by a visiting author to go back to school full-time. She earned a BA in American Studies and an MA in Creative Writing at Florida State University and then an MFA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. While pursuing her MFA, she worked at the Dictionary of American Regional English and immersed herself in the online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary where she began to find poetry in etymology. She began writing many of the poems that eventually formed The Alphabet Conspiracy. An animated video of the title poem was created by Flavor to showcase at the Association of Independent Commercial Producers Midwest Trade Show and can be viewed on her website at ritamaereese.com.

Rita Mae has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, a Stegner fellowship, and a "Discovery"/The Nation award. Her second book, The Book of Hulga, grew out of her obsession with Flannery O’Connor.

She is a co-director of literary arts at the Arts & Literature Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin. She is currently writing a ghost story.