About me – Ben Reed

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, but I was born in Texas and I’ve lived in Austin for the last twenty-five-ish years. I am an Associate Professor of Instruction at Texas State University, where I teach literature and creative writing. In the past I’ve worked as a bartender, a barista, airport ground crew for FedEx, a delivery driver for a bakery, a warehouse assistant for a birthday party supply company, and a longshoreman.

My short fiction and novellas have appeared in Pank, West Branch, The Seattle Review, Big Fiction, Meridian, and online at The Adroit Journal, Pacifica Literary Review, and Tin House. My essays have been published by Southern Humanities Review, Cream City Review, and online at The Missouri Review and The Millions. To find links to my work, visit the Read Something page of this site.

Some of my favorite writers are Valeria Luiselli, Ben Lerner, Amelia Gray, Etgar Keret, Joan Didion, Alejandro Zambra, Tim O’Brien, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Haruki Murakami, and Franz Kafka. I also maintain a scholarly side hustle writing about Kurt Vonnegut.

Curriculum Vitae

Recent Appearances

Paper: “Justice Revised: The Postcolonial Response Novel and the Problem of Facticity”
Presenter, The Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts 2024, Austin, Texas
With Taco Bell Quarterly and Malarkey Books

Reading: AWP Last Call at The Brick
Organizer and Presenter, AWP 2024 Offsite event, Kansas City, Missouri

Paper: “With Trousers Rolled: The Beach as Place and Space in Literature and Thought”
Presenter, The Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts 2021, Austin, Texas

Panel: Space Is the Place: Literary Spatialities and New Approaches to Placemaking
Organizer and Presenter, AWP 2020, San Antonio, Texas
With Ito Romo, Syed Ali Haider, and D.J. Lee

Reading: Excerpt from What Is a Beach?: Family History, Erasure, and Littoral Spatialities
Presenter, MLA International Symposium 2019, Lisbon, Portugal
Chair: Iona Luca; Discussant: Tatiana Kuzmic

Paper: “Kurt Vonnegut and Carl Sagan: A Tale of Two Assholes”
Presenter, American Literature Association 2018, San Francisco, California

Short Story Reading: “Angle & Distance”
Panelist, Northeast Modern Language Association 2018, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania