1630 E 7th Avenue Ybor
Tampa, FL 33605
United States
Join FMoPA on Thursday, August 1, from 5:30 pm to 7 pm for “The Lens at the End of the Line Break: A Poetic Lecture by the First Photo Laureate of St. Petersburg, Thomas Sayers Ellis.”
Poet, photographer, and bandleader Thomas Sayers Ellis is the author of The Maverick Room and Skin, Inc,: Identity Repair Poems, and Mexico, a book of photographs. He co-founded The Dark Room Collective and The Dark Room Reading Series in 1989 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His poems and photographs have appeared in numerous journals, including The Paris Review, Poetry, The Nation, and Best American Poetry (1997, 2001, 2010, 2015). In 2015, he co-founded Heroes Are Gang Leaders (HAGL), a literary Free Jazz band of artists who were awarded the American Book Award for Oral Literature in 2018. Having recorded six CDs to date, HAGL has performed in Paris, Berlin, Gdansk, The Hague, New York City and Lisbon. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in Poetry. His most recent book is Crank Shaped Notes (Arrowsmith Press, 2021). TSE was named the first Photo Laureate of St Petersburg, Florida in 2023. Paradise Paradise Layered, a new book of photographs is forthcoming midsummer.