Full Bio

Jeffrey Thomson is the author of Half/Life: New and Selected Poems (Alice James Books, 2019), a memoir, fragile, multiple books of poems, including Birdwatching in Wartime (Carnegie Mellon 2009), winner of both the 2010 Maine Book Award and the 2011 ASLE Award in Environmental Creative Writing, and Renovation (Carnegie Mellon 2005).   His second, The Country of Lost Sons, inaugurated a new poetry series from Parlor Press at Purdue University in February 2004.  His first book, The Halo Brace, was brought out in a limited edition letterpress version from Birch Brook Press in 1998.  His other books include the forthcoming poetry collections Five Satans and The Belfast Notebooks, and Many Ways to Dig a Tunnel, poems translated from the Spanish of Juan Carlos Flores, and From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great co-edited with Camille Dungy and Matt O’Donnell (Persea Books 2009).

RopeWalk Press brought out a limited edition chapbook of his work called The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge in March 2007 that was a finalist for the 2008 Maine Book Award, and, with Dionysus Press, he brought out an artist’s book/short poem sequence called Blind Desire in 2006.  Printed in a limited edition in English and Braille and featuring the photographs of Dennis Marsico, Blind Desire is part of a trilogy of books published for the exhibit Messages and Communications at the Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh. 

He has traveled widely and with his colleague, Drew Barton, a field ecologist and tree biologist, regularly teaches a course on environmental writing and the experience of nature in Costa Rica.

He has been awarded the 2012 Distinguished Fulbright Scholarship to the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre in Belfast, NI, and the Hodson Trust John Carter Brown Fellowship in 2015.  He was also the 2010-11 Trustee Professorship from the University of Maine System, a 2008 Individual Arts Fellowship in the Literary Arts from the Maine Arts Commission, a 2005 Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2006 Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Individual Artists Fellowship, and won the Masters Poetry Contest and the Academy of American Poets Prize on three occasions.  He has also been awarded Teaching Fellowships to the Wesleyan Writers Conference, the Writers @ Work conference, and the Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers Conference.  He received his PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Missouri in 1996 and is professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington’s BFA in Creative Writing.  He lives in Farmington, ME, with his wife and son.