Franklin D'Olier Reeve

Franklin D'Olier Reeve (known professionally as F.D. Reeve) is an American poet and father of late actor Christopher Reeve.

Born in Philadelphia but brought up outside New York City, Reeve worked in the wheat fields for a while during college and, after graduation, was a Hudson River longshoreman for a while. He graduated from Princeton (1950) and Columbia (1958), and in 1961 was one of the first exchangees between the American Council of Learned Societies and the USSR Academy of Sciences. In the late summer of 1962 he accompanied Robert Frost to Russia for his meeting with Nikita Khrushchev. After teaching at Columbia, Reeve moved to Wesleyan University, sometimes visiting at Oxford,Yale and Columbia before retiring in 2002. He lives in Wilmington, Vermont with his wife the novelist Laura Stevenson. Reeve was an officer of the Poetry Society of America, the founding editor of "Poetry Review," the secretary of Poets House in its formative years, and is now associated with the New England Poetry Club and the New York Quarterly. He has published three dozen books of poetry, fiction, criticism, and translation.