Books by Lorenzo Thomas

Dancing on Main Street  / Sing the Sun Up / Chances Are Few

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Lorenzo Thomas was born in Panama in 1944. Four years later the family immigrated to New York City, where Thomas grew up. Spanish was his first language, and he strove to master English. During his years at Queens College, Thomas joined the Umbra Workshop, a collective that met on the Lower East Side and served as a crucible for emerging black poets, among them Ishmael Reed, David Henderson, and Calvin Hernton. The workshop was one of the currents that fed the Black Arts Movement of the '60s and '70s.

After graduating from college Thomas joined the Navy, serving as a military adviser in Vietnam in 1971. In 1973 he moved to Houston as writer-in-residence at Texas Southern University. At TSU he helped edit the journal Roots. Later he conducted writing workshops at the newly formed Black Arts Center. He joined UH-Downtown in 1984.

Thomas' poetry collections include Chances Are Few (1979, expanded in 2003), The Bathers (1981), Sound Science (1992), and Dancing on Main Street (2004). About the last, the Houston Chronicle wrote: "Taken together, the poems in this collection exhibit that equipoise that comes with age and experience. Sorrow and joy find their balance." Poetry, Thomas once wrote, "attempts to knock the mind out of the rut of commonplace thinking."

For more than two decades a professor of English at the University of  Houston-Downtown, Thomas also made important contributions to the study of African-American literature. In 2000, the University of Alabama Press published Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and 20th-Century American Poetry, his overview of the work of James Fenton, Amiri Baraka and other important black writers. It was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book for the year.

His works have appeared in many journals including African American Review, Arrowsmith, Blues Unlimited (England), Living Blues, Partisan Review, Ploughshares, and Popular Music and Society, among others.  A regular book reviewer for the Houston Chronicle, he has also contributed scholarly articles to the African American Encyclopedia, American Literary Scholarship, Gulliver (Germany) and the Dictionary Of Literary Biography.

update 8 July 2008