Biography
“absurd tales of the trivial and mundane tales of the absurd” Ear Meat, Canada.
“These poems made me cry, shocked me, made me guffaw out loud” Ad-lib, W’ton.
Dave Reeves works as a performance poet, writer, blues musician, community artist, editor and publisher.
He was born in Netherton in the heart of the Black Country, an industrial region in central England, UK, whose distinctive dialect features in his work.
He performs his own writing with self-accompaniment on harmonica, melodeon and other instruments, and collaborates with a range of artists in performance and public art. He regularly promotes live events and publishes in a variety of media.
He was one of the first writers in the UK to become involved in using writing in primary healthcare and currently coordinates Lapidus Quarterly, the journal for Lapidus the organisation of Literary Arts in Personal Development.
In 1988 he founded The Moving Finger with Kath West and Stephen Clarke. A peripatetic creative writing group they delivered workshops and created publications throughout the UK. They pioneered the creation of pamphlets as part of the writing workshops so that participants and funding bodies had a record of the event. They later created complete books as part of their Bookendz projects, weeklong residencies with communities, and published them under the slogan ‘from pen to printer in five days’.
Since the first issue in 1995, Dave has been editor of Raw Edge Magazine a regional publication of new writing, funded by Arts Council England, which distributes 16.000 copies twice a year.
Photograph of Dave with DJ Derrick D
and writer Maeve Clarke by Owen Dunn