Hailing from Aotearoa New Zealand, Sam Reese is an award-winning critic, short story writer, and teacher.

A leading jazz critic, his 2019 book, Blue Notes was named a book of the year by Jazz Times (read a review here). His writing on jazz has appeared in magazines including Harper’s and the LA Review of Books. Most recently, Sam has worked with jazz giant Sonny Rollins to edit The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins, which was published with NYRB in 2024.

Sam’s short stories have won prizes in the US, UK, and New Zealand (most recently the Radio New Zealand Short Story Prize—listen here) and have been collected in two volumes: Come the Tide, published by Platypus Press in 2019 (read a review here), and on a distant ridgeline, from 2021. The TLS described this second collection as “a thoughtful and moving collection”  (you can read the rest of the review here).

He is at work on a new collection of linked stories, centred on a group of jazz musicians in New Zealand in the early ‘60s.

His study of The Short Story in Midcentury America won the 2018 Arthur Miller Centre First Book Prize, and he has published widely on midcentury fiction—particularly the work of Mary McCarthy, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Yates.