Jeffrey Thomson

Jeffrey Thomson received a PhD in creative writing from the University of Missouri in 1996, and he published his first book of poetry, The Halo Brace (Birch Brook Press) in 1998.

Thomson is the author of three additional poetry collections, including Birdwatching in Wartime (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2009), which was awarded both the 2010 Maine Book Award and the 2011 ASLE Award in Environmental Creative Writing. Of Thomson’s work, the poet Bob Hicok says, “The sheer appetite of these poems, their intellectual drive and rhythmic insistence, conveys an almost physical sense of the poet’s curiosity, a wonder that deepens, over the course of the book, to a conveyance of his love for the fullness of the natural world.”

Thomson has also published the memoir fragile (Red Mountain Press, 2015) and several translations, including The Poems of Catallus (Cambridge University Press, 2015) with Jeannine Diddle Uzzi.

In 2012 Thomson received a Distinguished Fulbright Scholarship to the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre in Belfast. He is also the recipient of fellowships from the Hodson Trust, the Maine Arts Commission, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. He currently serves as an associate professor at the University of Maine–Farmington and lives with his wife and son in Farmington, Maine.