Donovan M. Reves grew up in Columbia, Missouri, and was producing handwritten short fiction by second grade. While attending Oak Park High School in Kansas City, Missouri, he won second place for short fiction in at the statewide UMC Writing Festival for his science fiction story "The Hatch". By that time, he had also branched out into writing poetry and novels. After moving to Corvallis, Oregon for graduate school, he published several poems in local collections and his poem "To Do" won third prize in the Willamette Writers' Kay Snow contest in 2001. In 2008 and 2009 he self-published three collections of poetry and short stories, "Wombat Chow of the Damned", "How to Report a Coal Mining Problem", and "Festival at Naval Headquarters!" He has been active in local writing critique groups since 1999 and continues to write novels while working at a locally owned independent bookstore. In 2018, his short story "Triptych" was published in the online journal Lumina.