Thomas Glave

Background

Thomas Glave was born on November 10, 1964, in Bronx, New York, United States. He grew up there and in Kingston, Jamaica. He had a sister.

Education

Thomas Glave was educated in private and Catholic schools in New York City. He began writing when he was around 4 or 5 years old and started to take it more seriously when he got to high school. He also took dance lessons and was enthralled at an early age by the ballet of celebrated choreographer George Balanchine. In 1993 he received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Bowdoin College. In 1998 Glave obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree from Brown University. Thomas then spent one year in Jamaica as a Fulbright scholar, where he studied Jamaican historiography and the intellectual and literary traditions of Jamaica and the Caribbean.

Career

Since 2000 Thomas Glave has been a professor at the State University of New York, Binghamton University. He teaches courses that include the work of James Baldwin, Nadine Gordimer, Paule Marshall, Maryse Condé, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, African and African American queer writers, and 20th- and 21st-century Caribbean and Latin-American queer writers.

He has taught at the University of Virginia, Cleveland State University, Brown University, Indiana University, and Naropa University, and was Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. Glave has also been a two-time New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, and a Fellow of the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown (Massachusetts), in addition to having been Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a Visiting Fellow at England’s Clare Hall, University of Cambridge.

His short-story collection, Whose Song? and Other Stories (2000), has garnered multiple prizes and considerable critical attention. His other books include Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent, The Torturer’s Wife, and editor of the anthology Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, etc. His short stories, articles, and essays have been published in anthologies as well as in several periodicals, including Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, Callaloo, The Evergreen Chronicles, Gay Community News, the Jamaica Observer, the Jamaica Sunday Herald, The James White Review, Kingston Noir, The Kenyon Review, and The Massachusetts Review.

Achievements

• Thomas Glave is best known as the author of Whose Song? and Other Stories and Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent as well as also widely respected as an influential cultural critic. His work has earned many honors, including an O. Henry Prize and a Fulbright fellowship to Jamaica. His fiction and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals. His books received high praise from critics.

Works

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  • The Torturer's Wife

    (A woman is haunted by the atrocities committed by her hus...)

    2008
  • Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent

    (In these lyrical and powerful essays, Thomas Glave draws ...)

    2005
  • Whose Song?: And Other Stories

    (Author Thomas Glave is known for his stylistic brio and c...)

    2000
  • Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles

    (The first book of its kind, Our Caribbean is an anthology...)

    2008
  • Among the Bloodpeople: Politics and Flesh

    (Thomas Glave has been admired for his unique style and ex...)

    2013

Views

Glave is a founding member of the Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals, and Gays (J-FLAG), an advocacy organization based in Kingston, Jamaica. At the Oslo Freedom Forum in 2011, he spoke about the Caribbean – and specifically Jamaican violence against LGBTQ citizens. He dedicated his address to "the many unknown and brave people of Jamaica, risking their lives on a daily basis, to work towards justice and peace… for LGBT people, and all people, in Jamaica."

Glave is also a frequent commentator on Jamaican culture and society. When speaking about the Jamaican national motto, "Out of Many, One People," he notes with irony that it seems not to include LGBTQ Jamaicans. Of his work there, he stated, "Jamaica is not alone in being a homophobic place. The U.S. is still a very homophobic country. So is England, where I also spend a lot of time every year. Anyplace where those of us who are not heterosexual (and) cannot feel comfortable becomes a challenge to our spirit – to our LGBT human spirit."

Glave goes on to say, "But in spite of all its terrible problems – and Jamaica really has some grave problems – I really do love the country, and feel that [when I was working in J-FLAG] I was giving everything I had…in my soul, body, and mind, to make my country, Jamaica, a better one. I wouldn’t have it any other way." His writing is fueled not just by rage but by love for what Glave calls "the bloodpeople: the people of shared DNA, shared genes, and facial likenesses," and for Jamaica itself, which emerges in his prose as a place of extraordinary color and music and life, "the place that provides you with such indescribable joy in your heart – yes, in your very deepest heart."

Membership

Thomas Glave is a member of the Fulbright Association, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Jamaica Forum of Lesbians. All-Sexuals, and Gays (J-FLAG), Gay Men of African Descent, Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (City University of New York), Artists Advisory Committee (New York Foundation for the Arts).

References

• Contemporary Authors
  2004
• The Page of Thomas Glave on Twitter