photo credit: Evangelos Dousmanis

Associate Professor THOMAS GLAVE was born in the Bronx and grew up there and in Kingston, Jamaica. A graduate of Bowdoin College and Brown University, Glave traveled as a Fulbright Scholar to Jamaica, where he studied Jamaican historiography and Caribbean intellectual and literary traditions. While in Jamaica, he worked on issues of social justice, and helped found the Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals, and Gays (J-FLAG).

Glave is author of the collection Whose Song? and Other Stories (City Lights), nominated by the American Library Association for their Best Gay/Lesbian Book of the Year award and by the Quality Paperback Book Club for their Violet Quill/Best New Gay/Lesbian Fiction Award. His collection of experimental/political essays, Words To Our Now: Imagination and Dissent, was published in November 2005 by the University of Minnesota Press and was awarded the Lambda Award in Nonfiction in 2006. His edited anthology, Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, will appear from Duke University Press in 2008, followed in the same year by a new book of fiction, The Torturer's Wife (City Lights). The recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including an O. Henry Prize for fiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown, Glave was named a Writer on the Verge by The Village Voice in 2000. He is an associated faculty member of Latin American and Caribbean Area Studies (LACAS), Africana Studies, and Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture (PIC).

"Thomas Glave has the strong talent and courage to take up the right to enter the inner selves of both black and white characters in his stories. This is a creative claim beyond 'authenticity' determined by skin color. He also has that essential writer's ear for the way different people speak within their cultures, and what their idiom gives away of their inhibitions and affirmations." -- Nadine Gordimer (Nobel Laureate and author of The Pickup, July's People, Burger's Daughter, etc.) speaking about Whose Song?

LINKS:

Writers on the Verge from the Village Voice.

On the Difficulty of Confiding, with Complete Love and Trust, in Some Heterosexual "Friends," an essay from Words To Our Now on the Massachusetts Review website.