Prose Reece's first book-length prose was a companion essay to Guy Davenport's collection of his drawings and paintings,
A Balance of Quinces. Reece's 2006 book
Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness (New York:
Riverhead Books, 2006), with photos by
John J. Cox and a foreword by
Wendell Berry, chronicles the devastating effects of
mountaintop removal mining in
Appalachia from October 2003 through November 2004. The book grew out of an essay for ''
Harper's Magazine'' entitled "Death of a Mountain: Radical Strip Mining and the Leveling of Appalachia," which was published in the April 2005 edition and which would win the John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism from the
Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. In 2009, Reece published
An American Gospel: On Family, History, and The Kingdom of God (New York:
Riverhead Books, 2009), a book about Reece's upbringing as the son and grandson of Baptist preachers, his father's suicide, and his own subsequent struggle to find a form of Christianity with which he would feel comfortable—and the guidance he received from the writings of Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman and other American geniuses. This book, too, grew out of an essay for ''
Harper's Magazine'', "Jesus Without the Miracles: Thomas Jefferson's Bible and the Gospel of Thomas".
Poetry Reece's first published book was a chapbook of poems,
My Muse Was Supposed to Meet Me Here, published in 1992. He edited the 2007 anthology
Field Work: Modern Poems from Eastern Forests (Lexington, KY: The University of Press of Kentucky, 2007), an anthology of poems about the landscape and ecology of the eastern United States. It includes the work of modern American poets (among them,
Robert Frost,
Wendell Berry,
Hayden Carruth,
Charles Wright) plus that of four classical Chinese poets, who wandered and wrote about an area of southeastern China that is similar in landscape and ecology to the eastern woodlands of the United States. In 2024 he published
Kingfisher Blues through Fireside Industries, an imprint run by author
Silas House of the University Press of Kentucky. The book is a revealing and lyrical look at Reece's alcoholism and recovery. ==Awards==