Poet, novelist, and critic, graduate of Princeton and Columbia, Franklin Reeve has had a varied career, for a while driving a combine in the Midwest wheat fields, later acting in summer theater, and working as a longshoreman on the Hudson River docks.  He learned Russian and spent a year in Moscow and Leningrad as an exchange professor between the ACLS and the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

In the years that followed, Reeve continued to publish poetry, fiction and literary criticism in literary journals across the country and to review for the NY Times Book Review and the Washington Post's Book World.  After teaching in Columbia's Slavic Department and Wesleyan's Russian Department, he became a Professor of Letters at Wesleyan, from which he retired after a total of fifty years of academic service. During that time, he often traveled to England and Europe, including Russia, for research and presentation of his work. In1999 he visited Moscow and St. Petersburg for the seventh time to give readings and to lecture on poetry. In recent years he has presented his new poetry in both this country and England.