About

Juan Carlos Reyes has published the limited-print novella A Summer’s Lynching, winner of the Quarterly West 2017 Novella Prize, and the limited-print chapbook, Elements of a Bystander, winner of the 2018 Arcadia Press Fiction Chapbook Prize. He has received fellowships from the Alabama Prison Arts & Education Project, the Jack Straw Cultural Center, PEN USA / PEN America, and the WA State Artist Trust.

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His first full-length fiction collection, Three Alarm Fire, is forthcoming from Hinton Publishing, Fall 2024.

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His short fictions and essays have appeared in Florida Review, Waccamaw Journal, and Moss, among others. He is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Seattle University and has served on the board for UNESCO Seattle City of Literature, an organization that works towards equity and sustainable development by mobilizing the literary and arts communities.

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Reyes's favorite number is 17. It's prime, it's odd, and it's so very odd.

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Originally from Guayaquil, Ecuador, Reyes arrived to the United States at three years old. He grew up in West New York, NJ, a small, tumultuous city of many languages, ethnicities, accents, traditions, addictions, congestions, cultural practices, political machinations, social faux pas, and family histories, a city on the precipice of a cliff that measures its tensions by how much it can keep from spilling into the Hudson River, a city forever in the shadow of its namesake, a certain New York City.

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Reyes learned the English language by watching Mets baseball and WWF wrestling on his first television, a black and white itty bitty thing with an antenna that, set at just the right angle, could offer a decent signal if, and only if, the VHF/UHF dial was also set to just the right combination.

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Reyes joined his school band in the fourth grade, and he chose the saxophone to play. Though he never learned more than a dozen notes, the instrument was instrumental during that year's Halloween when he trick-or-treated dressed in his usual discounted clothes while carrying the saxophone case and pretending to be an underemployed musician.

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Reyes remained an undocumented American until he was ten years old.

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Reyes has formally lived in New York City, Los Angeles, Tuscaloosa (AL), and Seattle, among other places. He has also pretended to live, for anyone who has heard him lie, in Atlantic City, Washington, DC, the Florida panhandle, the Devil's Highway, Macondo, Mexico City, the Falkland Islands, the Galápagos Islands, and his working office, among other places of variable repute.

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He is now married with two children and two pets. It is a good life.