The Poet and the Poem
2021-22 Series

Featured Thomas Sayers Ellis

Click here for Thomas Sayers Ellis.mp3

Thomas Sayers Ellis co-founded The Dark Room Collective (1989) and Heroes Are Gang Leaders (2014), a Free Jazz literary band of musicians and writers who were awarded the American Book Award for Oral Literature in 2018. He is the author of The Maverick Room, Skin Inc.: Identity Repair Poems, The Corny Toys (a chapbook) and Crank Shaped Notes (2021) and Mexico (2021), a book of photographs. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry (1997, 2001, 2010, 2015); The Paris Review; Poetry; Grand Street, Tin House and The Nation. In 2019, "Manually Forcing All Modes of ReSKINstance Into Fo(lk)cus," a solo exhibition of photographs, was presented at Studio 81 in Mantova, Italy. Ellis was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry in 2015.

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