your word: Teen Creative Writing Residency

2008 Master Writers in Residence

Thomas Sayers Ellis, Poetry

Thomas Sayers Ellis was born and raised in Washington, D.C., where he attended Paul Laurence Dunbar High School. 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 and Blackfist: Notes for Black Poets is also forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press, Poets on Poetry Series.

* For more information about Thomas Sayers Ellis, please visit http://www.tsellis.com