community work
As part of his work at Westminster College, he organizes the Westminster Visiting Writers Series, began Westminster's collaboration with the international Douglass Day research project, founded the English Department's annual writing awards, is the faculty advisor for the student literary journal and student readings, has worked as part of the Hancock Symposium, as a representative for the Daniel Boone Regional Library's One Read program, and as part of several other faculty, departmental, and community collaborations.
Before moving to Missouri, Reed co-founded The Only Tenn-I-See Reading Series with poet Katie Condon as an unaffiliated community project bringing emerging and established writers from around the country to read their poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Based in Knoxville, Tennessee, the readings were free, open to the public, and ran once per month in local small businesses for four years. Readers included Justin Boening, Diamond Forde, Janine Joseph, Edgar Kunz, Nabila Lovelace, Wayne Miller, Rosalie Moffett, Alicia Mountain, Jacob Sunderlin, Lindsay Tigue, Devon Walker-Figueroa, and many more.
While in Tennessee, Reed worked on other community-oriented events as well. As Joy Harjo's assistant for three years, he coordinated campus readings and visits from writers of national and international reputation, including Natalie Diaz, Ali Cobby Eckermann, LeAnne Howe, Dunya Mikhail, and more. Simultaneously, he joined Condon and poet Tiana Clark to create the UTK-Vanderbilt Graduate Student Exchange. A reading series which alternated between Knoxville and Nashville each semester, the students in one program would host the students from the other in their homes to make connections and organize a public reading for their guests in local art galleries.