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Thomas Sayers Ellis was born October 5, 1963, in Washington, D.C. He earned an MFA from Brown University in 1995, and in 2005, Graywolf Press published his first complete poetry collection, The Maverick Room, for which he received the 2006 John C. Zacharis First Book Award. His most recent collection is Skin, Inc.: Identity Repair Poems (Graywolf Press, 2010).
Ellis is also cofounder, with Sharan Strange, of the Dark Room Collective, whose mission was to form a community of emerging and established African American writers. Ellis and Strange founded the Collective in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1988, and the group included such celebrated poets as Major Jackson, Carl Phillips, Tracy K. Smith, Natasha Trethewey, and Kevin Young.
Ellis is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Fine Arts Work Center, the MacDowell Colony, the Ohio Arts Council, and Yaddo, as well as a Whiting Writers’ Award. In 2015, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry. He has also served as a contributing editor to Callaloo.
Bibliography
Poetry
Skin, Inc.: Identity Repair Poems (Graywolf Press, 2010)
The Maverick Room (Graywolf Press, 2005)
Tracy K. Smith was the poet laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. She received the...
Carl Phillips is the author of several books, including Then the War: And Selected Poems,...
Major Jackson is the author of five collections of poetry, including The Absurd Man (W....
Kevin Young's poetry collections include Brown (Alfred A. Knopf, 2018) and Book of...
Natasha Trethewey, who has served as both the state poet laureate of Mississippi and the U.S....