Erica Reid, poet

Erica Reid, M.F.A., is an award-winning writer based in Colorado. Her manuscript Ghost Man on Second won the Donald Justice Poetry Prize and was published by Autumn House Press. In 2025 she earned a Pushcart Prize for her poem "Pelt." Along with poet Jake Friedlander, she is a 2026-2028 Poet Laureate of Fort Collins, Colorado.

Ghost Man on Second cover image

Poetry collection

Erica Reid’s debut collection, Ghost Man on Second, traces a daughter’s search for her place in the world after estrangement from her parents.Reid writes, “It’s hard to feel at home unless I’m aching.” Growing from this sense of isolation, Reid’s stories create new homes in nature, in mythology, and in poetic forms—including sestinas, sonnets, and golden shovels—containers that create and hold new realizations and vantage points.Reid stands up to members of her family, asking for healing amid dissolving bonds. These poems move through emotional registers, embodying nostalgia, hurt, and hope. Throughout Ghost Man on Second, the poems portray Reid’s active grappling with home and confrontation with the ghosts she finds there.

Press for Ghost Man on Second

"Reid’s cunning and mellifluous debut makes the song of the everyday—a quarrel, the human body, an Ohio landscape—come alive in full-throated harmony. [...] Come for the sonic joy of these poems, stay for Reid’s rich, self-searching meditations on family dysfunction."
—starred review in Publishers Weekly (Jan 2024)

"Writing from a world where "nothing goes at my pace," Reid offers this debut collection that contemplates how to live within the nostalgia of an absent father and a distant mother and where to land in an isolated—though contemplatively inviting—natural world."
—"Our Favorite Poetry Books of 2024, So Far..." from New York Public Library (Mar 2024)

"Reid’s collection of poems proudly announces her arrival. She raises her fist on the page, demanding unapologetically to be seen."
—"Throw Out the Old Rules" from Rocky Mountain Reader (Nov 2024)

"Ghost Man on Second is an ambitious and finely-wrought first collection that exhibits Erica Reid’s prowess in poetic form and figuration as well as deeply incisive observations on the nature of family and what and where home can be. Reid takes the reader on a satisfying journey through difficult, language-rich terrain to show that home is a place we leave and arrive to over and over, like the Ghost Man: invisibly and with purpose, grief, and triumph."
—Colorado Review (Dec 2024)

"In Reid’s Ghost Man on Second, the real ghost man floating through the pages is the sonnet. Whether it dwells in the magnificent fourteen sonnets about her difficult relationship with her mother that form a crown, or in other poems that are more low-key about their status, or still others that show metrical or other echoes of that venerable yet plastic form, the sonnet haunts Reid’s consciousness as surely as any familial estrangement."
—Merion West (Feb 2025)

"Although the poet leaves us with the sense that she can barely remember the earlier sorrows and is headed somewhere bigger and wider, I suspect she is still running toward home. [...] Erica Reid’s truest home is poetry, right here, between these lines."
—New Verse Review (Mar 2026)