Thomas Lux (December 10, 1946 – February 5, 2017) was an American
poet
A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator ( thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral or writte ...
who held the Margaret T. and
Henry C. Bourne, Jr.
Henry Clark Bourne Jr. (December 31, 1921 – March 25, 2010) was an electrical engineer, administrator and faculty member at the Georgia Institute of Technology from 1981 until 1993. He was initially recruited by Georgia Tech president Joseph M. ...
Chair in Poetry at the
Georgia Institute of Technology
The Georgia Institute of Technology, commonly referred to as Georgia Tech or, in the state of Georgia, as Tech or The Institute, is a public research university and institute of technology in Atlanta, Georgia. Established in 1885, it is part of ...
and ran Georgia Tech's "Poetry @ Tech" program.
He wrote fourteen books of poetry.
Early life and education
Thomas Lux was born in
Northampton, Massachusetts
The city of Northampton is the county seat of Hampshire County, Massachusetts, United States. As of the 2020 census, the population of Northampton (including its outer villages, Florence and Leeds) was 29,571.
Northampton is known as an acade ...
, son of a milkman and a
Sears & Roebuck
Sears, Roebuck and Co. ( ), commonly known as Sears, is an American chain of department stores founded in 1892 by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck and reincorporated in 1906 by Richard Sears and Julius Rosenwald, with what began a ...
switchboard operator, neither of whom graduated from high school. Lux was raised in Massachusetts on a dairy farm.
Lux graduated from
Emerson College in
Boston
Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...
, where he was also poet in residence from 1970–1975. His first book—''Memory's Handgrenade''—was published shortly after.
Academic career
Lux was a member of the writing faculty at
Sarah Lawrence College
Sarah Lawrence College is a Private university, private liberal arts college in Yonkers, New York. The college models its approach to education after the Supervision system, Oxford/Cambridge system of one-on-one student-faculty tutorials. Sara ...
, where he taught for twenty-seven years, from 1975 until 2001.
He was also a core faculty member of the
Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program for Writers. In 1996 he was a visiting professor at
University of California, Irvine
The University of California, Irvine (UCI or UC Irvine) is a public land-grant research university in Irvine, California. One of the ten campuses of the University of California system, UCI offers 87 undergraduate degrees and 129 graduate and pr ...
.
A former
Guggenheim Fellow
Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...
and three times a recipient of grants from the
National Endowment for the Arts
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal ...
, Lux received, in 1995, the $50,000
Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
The Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards are a pair of American prizes based at Claremont Graduate University. They are given to poets for their collections of poetry written in the English language, by a citizen or legal resident alien of the ...
for his sixth collection, ''Split Horizons.''
In 2003, Lux was awarded an honorary doctorate of Letters from Emerson College.
His poems were featured in many notable anthologies, including ''American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets'' (2006). In 2012, Lux received the Robert Creeley Award.
At the time of his death in February 2017, Lux was the Margaret T. and
Henry C. Bourne, Jr.
Henry Clark Bourne Jr. (December 31, 1921 – March 25, 2010) was an electrical engineer, administrator and faculty member at the Georgia Institute of Technology from 1981 until 1993. He was initially recruited by Georgia Tech president Joseph M. ...
Chair in Poetry at the
Georgia Institute of Technology
The Georgia Institute of Technology, commonly referred to as Georgia Tech or, in the state of Georgia, as Tech or The Institute, is a public research university and institute of technology in Atlanta, Georgia. Established in 1885, it is part of ...
where he began teaching in 2001.
At Georgia Tech he ran their "Poetry at Tech" program,
which included one of the best known poetry reading series in the country, along with community outreach classes and workshops.
[Lux describes the genesis and development of the program in "The Poem Is a Bridge: Poetry@Tech," in: ''Humanistic Perspectives in a Technological World'', ed. Richard Utz, Valerie B. Johnson, and Travis Denton (Atlanta: School of Literature, Media, and Communication, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2014), pp. 72–5.]
Before his death, Lux edited (and wrote the Introduction to)
Bill Knott's posthumous publication ''I Am Flying into Myself: Selected Poems 1960–2014'' which appeared in February 2017.
Death
Lux died of lung cancer at his home in Atlanta, Georgia on February 5, 2017, survived by his wife Jennifer Holley Lux and a daughter from a previous marriage, Claudia Lux.
Bibliography
Poetry
;Collections
*
*
* ''Sunday'' (1979)
* ''Half Promised Land'' (1986)
* ''The Drowned River'' (1990)
* ''Split Horizon'' (1994)
* ''The Blind Swimmer: Selected Early Poems, 1970–1975'' (1996)
* ''New and Selected Poems, 1975–1995'' (1997)
* ''The Street of Clocks'' (2001)
* ''The Cradle Place'' (2004)
* ''God Particles'' (2008)
* ''Child Made of Sand'' (2012)
* ''Selected Poems'' (Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2014)
* ''To the Left of Time'' (2016)
;Chapbooks
* ''The Land Sighted'' (chapbook, 1970)
* ''Madrigal on the Way Home'' (chapbook, 1976)
* ''Like a Wide Anvil from the Moon the Light'' (chapbook, 1980)
* ''Massachusetts'' (chapbook, 1981)
* ''Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy'' (chapbook, 1983)
* ''A Boat in the Forest'' (chapbook, 1992)
* ''Pecked to Death by Swans'' (chapbook, 1993)
;List of poems
References
External links
''Love It Hard'': Thomas Lux On Poetry, profile and interview with Sally Molini in ''Cerise Press,'' Summer 2009Academy of American Poets profileA few poems by Thomas LuxPoetry at Tech*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lux, Thomas
1946 births
2017 deaths
20th-century American poets
21st-century American poets
Lux,Thomas
Georgia Tech faculty
Iowa Writers' Workshop alumni
Iowa Writers' Workshop faculty
The New Yorker people
Sarah Lawrence College faculty
Writers from Northampton, Massachusetts