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, Glave worked on issues of social justice, and helped found the Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals, and Gays (J-FLAG, www.jflag.org).  Glave is the author of the collection Whose Song? and Other Stories (City Lights), which was 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 essay collection Words To Our Now: Imagination and Dissent was published in November 2005 by the University of Minnesota Press.  His edited anthology, Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, will be published by Duke University Press in 2006.  He has recently completed a second collection of fiction, and is working on a longer fictional work.

Glave has taught at the University of Virginia, Cleveland State, Brown, Indiana, and Naropa Universities, and is presently an assistant professor of English and Africana Studies at the State University of New York, Binghamton.  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. (December 2005)

Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent
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ISBN: 0816646791
Format: Hardcover, 216pp
Pub. Date: November 2005
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press

Read An AALBC.com Book Review

Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent is a riveting collection of lyrical and poltical essays by Thomas Glave, a professor of English at SUNY Binghamton.  Moving between the lush sensuality of Jamaica in the Caribbean, New York City, the revelations about Abu Ghraib, the war in Iraq, and the world beyond, these essays have been described by French Caribbean novelist Maryse Condé as “a consummate pleasure.”  Glave, a Fulbright Scholar and the recipient of numerous writing awards, has been compared to James Baldwin and Frantz Fanon, and described by The New York Times Book Review as “a gifted stylist” whose work is always concerned with “the most serious matters of existence.”  He is the author of a fiction collection, Whose Song? and Other Stories.

"As a black male who is also gay, I and my brothers and our black lesbian sisters are considered ‘disposables' throughout the world, throughout time past and present, in our own black communities and in white ones. This is clearly the case in Jamaica and most other Caribbean nations, and it is certainly true in the supposedly more ‘progressive' United States. What will the force of this virulent hatred mean for our futures, and who will decide once again which of us is disposable? And: will we stand together when the time comes for us to face that machine-gun fire? All of us? Beyond our prejudices?"

In these lyrical and powerful essays, Thomas Glave draws on his experiences as a politically committed, gay Jamaican American to deliver a searing condemnation of the prejudices, hatreds, and inhumanities that persist in the United States and elsewhere as both official policy and social reality. Exposing the hypocrisies and contradictions of liberal multiculturalism, Glave offers instead a politics of heterogeneity in which difference informs the theory and practice of democracy. At the same time, he experiments with language and form, blurring the lines between fiction and nonfiction, to provide a compelling model of creative writing as a tool for social change and humanity.

From the death of black gay poet Essex Hemphill to the revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib, Glave puts forth a deeply moral and ethical understanding of human rights to make vital connections across nations, races, genders, and sexualities.

Whose Song?: And Other Stories
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ISBN: 0872863751
Format: Paperback, 264pp
Pub. Date: October 2000
Publisher: City Lights Books

Voted a "Writer on the Verge" by the Village Voice Literary Supplement Whose Song? And Other Stories is the literary debut of a talented young writer, Thomas Glave. His writing is marked by an energy, an ambition, and a fearlessness that are all too rare.

Threads of African American and gay experience, as well as Caribbean and Caribbean-American culture and history connect these stories, set in the Bronx and other parts of New York City, Boston, the American South, and the Caribbean. "Commitment" takes place on the day before a wedding in the rural South. Two young black men are forced to end their clandestine relationship as the father of one of them threatens to kill them both. In "Their Story," two elderly men, one from Jamaica and the other from the South, lose their wives and find comfort with each other. "—And Love Them?" is the one-sided dialogue of a white woman, an office worker who tries to communicate her conflicted feelings toward "them," that is, the black people she encounters at her job, on the streets of New York, and in her imagination. And "The Pit" is a haunting, harrowing tale about a young Caribbean boy who visits the site of an enormous killing field and returns to his terrorized village endowed with prophetic powers.

Thomas Glave is a deft stylist, and each of the nine stories in this collection reveals yet another of his successful technical experiments.

Best Black Gay Erotica
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Darieck Scott (Editor)

ISBN: 1573442046
Format: Paperback, 231pp
Pub. Date: December 2004
Publisher: Cleis Press

In a powerful collection celebrating sex between black men, Best Black Gay Erotica raises the standard for literary porn. From the slowly building heat of Reginald Harris's love story "The Dream," to the raw lust of Jay Russell's "Rude Boys," in which two tops at a sex club negotiate which of them will give it up, these stories serve up a rich feast of erotic imagination.

The narrator of Canaan Parker's "One for the Road" recalls the particular skill that made his finest lover, Marco the Magnificent, famous on the streets. And Samuel R. Delany's "The Sleepwalkers" is a paean to the heyday of gay sex in New York, when a night among the burly beer-swigging men of the Mine Shaft ended only at dawn. With contributions by Thomas Glave, Belasco, and James Earl Hardy, Best Black Gay Erotica presents some of the hottest and best-written erotica in print today.

Contact Information

Thomas Glave
Assistant Professor
Dept. of English, General Literature, and Rhetoric
State University of New York, Binghamton
P.O. Box 6000
Binghamton, New York 13902-6000
U.S.A.

Related Links

Black like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual African American Fiction
Glave is Included in this Anthology
http://reviews.aalbc.com/black_like_us.htm

University of Minnesota Press
http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/G/glave_words.html

 

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