Thomas Glave

Thomas Glave is the author of Whose Song? And Other Stories, a fearless and experimental collection of short stories that Gloria Naylor describes as “brutal in some places, tender in others, but always honestly told.” Glave is the second black gay author to win the O. Henry Award, and has been compared to such writers as Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright.

Whose Song? And Other Stories is characterized by disturbing and beautiful intensity. In “Final Inning,” the story for which Glave received the O. Henry Award, friends of a recently deceased man confront the secret that he died of AIDS; in “Commitment,” a violent and threatening father forces his son to end his romantic relationship with another man; “Whose Song” takes place in the Bronx and explores the connection between rape and sexual repression.

These stories, which rhythmically blend the line between poetry and prose, dream and reality, reflect Glave’s own vision of writing: “I want to write the way musicians like Miles Davis or Cecil Taylor play their instrument. My life’s goal is to work for that kind of beautiful execution of artistic expression.”

"Glave is a gifted stylist...blessed with ambition, his own voice and an impressive willingness to dissect how individuals actually think and behave.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Glave's rare insight, boundless courage, and fierce imagination make these stories resound long after you turn the last page.”
—The Village Voice

“What a writer! What a book! Glave is a brilliant writer of startlingly fresh prose…His stories are intricate tapestries of life rendered through a triumphant act of the imagination.” —Clarence Major

Glave’s fiction appears in such anthologies as Ancestral House: The Black Short Story in The Americas and Europe, Children Of The Night: The Best Short Stories By Black Writers 1967-Present, His 2: Brilliant New Fiction By Gay Writers, Soulfires:Young Black Men On Love And Violence, Best American Gay Fiction 3, PrizeStories 1997: The O. Henry Awards, and Gay Fiction at the Millennium. His nonfiction, which covers such issues as language, homosexuality in Jamacia, and territorial convergence between America and Jamaica, is published in The Massachusetts Review, Callaloo, and The Kenyon Review.

Growing up in the Bronx and in Kingston, Jamaica, Glave returned to Jamaica on a Fulbright Fellowship. There he studied studied Jamaican historiography, Jamaican-Caribbean intellectual and literary traditions, and also founded the Jamaica Forum of Lesbians, All-Sexuals, and Gays (J-FLAG). Of his work in Jamacia, Glave says, “I felt that I was not only working in a true spirit of struggle with fellow Jamaicans as a human rights activist—all of us risking our lives with this work each day, in a virulently homophobic country—but also contributing to the inevitable moving forward of my country.”

An honors graduate of Bowdoin College and a graduate of Brown University, Glave is currently at work on three books, including a study of contemporary Caribbean LGBT writings. He teaches creative writing and English at the State University of New York/Binghamton.

Thomas Glave will teach a fiction class, "That Scary World, Out There (In Here): Conjuring Political Fiction," at the 2004 conference.

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