Dancing on Main Street
Author Biography

Photo by Mark Hiebert

Lorenzo Thomas was born in Panama, grew up in New York City, attended Queens College (City University of New York), and served in Vietnam with the U.S. Navy. He is an acclaimed poet, cultural critic, Professor of English and Director of the Cultural Enrichment Center at the University of Houston-Downtown. He has also worked with the Poetry-in-the-Schools programs in New York, Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, Arkansas, Georgia, and California.

Thomas's writing has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including African American Review, Partisan Review, Ploughshares, Callaloo, and the Norton anthology Postmodern American Poetry. He is the author of Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century American Poetry and his books of poetry include Chances are Few and The Bathers. Thomas's poem, 'Sugar Hill,' was selected by the Poetry Society of America for its Dallas, Texas Poetry in Motion program which places poetry in city buses. Thomas's many awards and honors include two Poets Foundation awards, a Choice Outstanding Academic Book award, a Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and the Lucille Medwick Prize.