Lorenzo Thomas Biography

Lorenzo Thomas was an eminent American poet and literary figure. He gained popularity through his honest and cutting edge writing on his personal experiences during the African-American artistic movement. His childhood was marked by an easy life, with the exception of the local kids bullying him on his Spanish language, which motivated him to master English later on. It was during his college days that he became a member of the Umbra workshop where he befriended various upcoming black poets and got familiar with the culture, music, and cinema prevailing in the African-American era of the 1960s and 1970s, which formed a major part of his poetry collections and other scholarly works. His works mostly dealt with issues in Vietnam and civil rights movement. Some of his distinguished works included ‘Chances Are Few’, ‘Dancing on Main Street’, ‘The Bathers’, ‘Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century American Poetry’, and ‘Don’t Deny My Name: Words and Music and the Black Intellectual Tradition’. A number of his works got published in different journals, such as Living Blues, Popular Music and Society, African American Review, Arrowsmith, and others. Apart from his literary career, he served in the Navy in Vietnam and worked at Texas Southern University and University of Houston-Downtown, for over 20 years