Lars Eighner's US Bookstore Presents The Texas Institute of Letters Authors

Lorenzo Thomas(31 August 1944 - 4 July 2005) was a poet, critic, and educator. He was born in Panama and emigrated to New York City in 1948 with his father Herbert Hamilton Thomas, a pharmacist, and his mother Luzmilda (neé Gilling), a community organizer.

He studied at Queens College and the Pratt Institute, and was a founding member of the Umbra Workshop with many notable African American poets of his generation. After serving in Vietnam, he moved to Houston where he was writer-in-residence at TSU before joining the faculty of the Downtown campus of the University of Houston where he was a professor of English for more than twenty years.

His poetry includes A Visible Island, Fit Music: California Songs, Dracula, The Bathers: Selected Poems, Chances Are Few, and Dancing on Main Street.

His works of criticism include Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century American Poetry.

Dancing on Main Street

Dancing on Main Street

by Lorenzo Thomas

Dancing on Main Street
"…the poems in this collection exhibit that equipoise that comes with age and experience."
Fritz Lanham
The Houston Chronicle