Thomas Lux

1946 –
2017
Read poems by this poet

Thomas Lux was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1946, and attended Emerson College and the University of Iowa.

Lux’s numerous books of poetry are To the Left of Time (Mariner Books, 2016); Child Made of Sand (Houghton Mifflin, 2012); God Particles (Houghton Mifflin, 2008); The Cradle Place (Houghton Mifflin, 2004); The Street of Clocks (Houghton Mifflin, 2001); New and Selected Poems, 1975–1995 (Houghton Mifflin, 1997), which was a finalist for the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Split Horizon (Houghton Mifflin, 1994), for which he received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy (Ampersand Books, 1983); The Glassblower’s Breath (Cleveland State University Press, 1976); Memory’s Handgrenade (Pym-Randall, 1972); and The Land Sighted (Pym-Randall, 1970).

The late Stanley Kunitz noted that “[Lux is] sui generis, his own kind of poet, unlike any of the fashions of his time.” Rita Dove, writing for the Washington Post Book World, has said, “Try Lux on for size. He’ll pinch in places, soothe in others, but I predict one thing: you may never fit the same way in your own skin again.

Lux was poet in residence at Emerson College (1972–75) and a member of the writing faculty at both Sarah Lawrence College and in the Warren Wilson MFA program for writers. He also taught at the University of Iowa, the University of Michigan, and the University of California, Irvine, among other institutions. He was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and received three National Endowment for the Arts grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Lux lived in Atlanta, where he served as the Bourne Professor of Poetry and the director of the McEver Visiting Writers program at the Georgia Institute of Technology, until his death. He died on February 5, 2017.