Background
He was born in Timmins, Ontario and came of age on the west coast of Canada.
He was born in Timmins, Ontario and came of age on the west coast of Canada.
University of British Columbia.
Reid co-founded the influential poetry journal TISH in Vancouver in 1961 with George Bowering, Frank Davey, David Dawson, and Fred Wah. He published his first collection of poems, The Manitoba Whose Path Was on Fire, in 1969. A short time later he joined the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) and stopped writing for 25 years in favour of political activism "because didn’t have a way of working the language of politics into the language of poetry."
Reid also edited and contributed to the intergenerational Vancouver literary journal Tads (1996-2001) through which Reid, George Bowering, Renee Rodin, and George Stanley mentored younger writers, including Thea Bowering, Wayde Compton, Regional Johanson, Ryan Knighton, Jason le Heup, Cath Morris, Chris Turnbull, and Karina Vernon.