He is the author of six books of nonfiction - Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness: Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalachia (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006) and An American Gospel: On Family, History, and The Kingdom of God (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009), The Embattled Wilderness (Atlanta, University of Georgia Press, 2013), Utopia Drive: A Road Trip Through America's Most Radical Idea (New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2017), Practice Resurrection (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2017), Clear Creek: Toward a Natural Philosophy (Charleston: West Virginia University Press, 2023), one book of poetry,Kingfisher Blues (Lexington: Fireside Industries Press, 2024), and numerous essays and magazine articles, published in Harper's Magazine, The Nation, and Orion magazine.
Reece's first book-length prose was a companion essay to Guy Davenport's collection of his drawings and paintings, A Balance of Quinces.
In 2009, Reece published An American Gospel: On Family, History, and The Kingdom of God (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009), a book about Reece's upbringing as the son and grandson of Baptist preachers, his father's suicide, and his own subsequent struggle to find a form of Christianity with which he would feel comfortable—and the guidance he received from the writings of Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman and other American geniuses.
It includes the work of modern American poets (among them, Robert Frost, Wendell Berry, Hayden Carruth, Charles Wright) plus that of four classical Chinese poets, who wandered and wrote about an area of southeastern China that is similar in landscape and ecology to the eastern woodlands of the United States.
In 2024 he published Kingfisher Blues through Fireside Industries, an imprint run by author Silas House of the University Press of Kentucky.