Thomas Sayers Ellis

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Thomas Sayers Ellis is a poet, photographer, and Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York and a core faculty member of the Lesley University Low Residency MFA Program in Cambridge, MA. He previously taught as an associate professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH. His first full collection, The Maverick Room, was published by Graywolf Press. The book takes as its subject the social, geographical and historical neighborhoods of Washington, D.C., (where he was born and raised) bringing different tones of voice to bear on the various quadrants of the city. He is also the author of The Good Junk (Take Three #1, Graywolf 1996); a chapbook The Genuine Negro Hero (Kent State University Press, 2001) and the chaplet Song On (WinteRed Press 2005).

Mr. Ellis attended Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Washington D.C. In 1988 he co-founded The Dark Room Collective, an organization that celebrated and gave greater visibility to emerging and established writers of color (Cambridge, Massachusetts). He later went on to earn a M.F.A. from Brown University in 1995. Ellis is known in the poetry community as a literary activist and innovator, one whose poems, "resist limitations and rigorously embrace wholeness" (Agni). His poems have appeared in magazines such as Callaloo, Grand Street, Harvard Review, Tin House, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art and The Best American Poetry (1997 and 2001). He has received fellowships and grants from The Fine Arts Work Center, the Ohio Arts Council, Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony.

Thomas Sayers Ellis is a contributing editor to Callaloo and a consulting editor to A Public Space. He recently compiled and edited Quotes Community: Notes for Black Poets (University of Michigan Press, Poets on Poetry Series). He is currently hard at work a a book of photographs titled The Go-Go Book: People in the Pocket in Washington D.C.

His father was a race car driver and a boxer while his mother worked multiple, lower income jobs, including at McDonald's, to support the family. His teaching style is unorthodox and often has students recite their poems while slowly turning in a circle. Susie Asado by Gertrude Stein, National Geographic by Elizabeth Bishop and Death of a Naturalist by Seamus Heaney are sometimes part of his introductory instruction. He studied under Seamus Heaney at Harvard University and enjoys hanging out in spots like Busboys and Poets in D.C.

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