Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in the USA in 1947, he was adopted shortly after birth by Jewish parents Alexander and Freda Reiter, and brought up in a working-class neighbourhood.
Reiter completed his master's degree in American Literature, writing his thesis on William Faulkner's The Wild Palms owing to his interest in interdisciplinary subjects.
[citation needed] In 1975, he accepted a position as a lecturer at Cariboo College, a two-year university level institution in the interior of British Columbia, where he taught literature and writing for ten years.
In 1980 he took leave of absence to attend the University of Denver, where he completed his PhD in Creative Writing, with a collection of stories as his dissertation, and American Literature as his literary field of speciality.
His first job in Australia was as a lecturer in professional writing at the then Canberra College of Advanced Education where he set up one of the country's first electronic editing programs and was founding editor of the literary magazine Redoubt.
He married Cherie Lorraine Dawson in 1992 shortly after resigning his position at the University of Canberra and becoming publishing manager for the Board of Senior Secondary School Studies in Brisbane.