Poet, professor and photographer, Thomas Sayers Ellis was
born and raised in Washington, D.C., where he attended Paul Laurence
Dunbar High School. Known on the Go-Go scene as Sticks and Sayers, he
played timbales and rototoms with Heavy Connection and the Petworth Band
before leaving for college, He co-founded The Dark Room Collective in
Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1988 and earned a M.F.A. from Brown University
in 1995. His work has appeared in many journals and anthologies,
including Poetry, Grand Street, Tin House, Ploughshares 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. Mr. Ellis is a contributing editor to Callaloo and Poets
and Writers. In 2005 he was awarded a Mrs. Giles Whiting Writers' Award.
His first, full collection, The Maverick Room, was published by Graywolf
Press in 2005 and awarded The 2006 John C. Zacharis First Book Award. 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). An Assistant Professor of
Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence College and a faculty member of The
Lesley University low-residency M.F.A program (Cambridge, Massachusetts),
his Breakfast nad Blackfist:
Notes for Black Poets is also forthcoming from the University of
Michigan Press, Poets on Poetry Series. www.tsellis.com
A
Venue To Remember, TSE
2007
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