He doesn’t sit still well, Zachary Reid.
He lived in six states and attended seven schools by the time he was 14, and he never really learned how to settle in anywhere. But that’s all right. You know what you know, and what he knows is how to find inspiration wherever he goes.
He found a way to turn being restless, and perhaps a touch socially awkward, into a career telling stories: as a writer, photographer and visual artist. He was paid to write for magazines and newspapers for more than 25 years. The photos have come with the words, and often by themselves. The art just comes, visual manifestations of a restless mind.
He has written about and photographed travel and international outreach projects in places including Cuba, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico and Peru. He has reported on the Middle Eastern refugee crisis from Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia and Hungary. He has also traveled and written about the route the Mississippi River takes from its Minnesota headwaters to where it disappears into the Gulf of Mexico just past a shrimp boat marina in Louisiana, and about relief work in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina left that city in shambles.
His once owned a small art gallery but discovered, quickly, that he much preferred making art to selling it.
He lives in Richmond, Va., with his wife. He has four mostly grown children, who were all kind enough to get their own places, and two of whom have accounted for his five grandchildren.