Lorenzo Thomas

Lorenzo Thomas (August 31, 1944 – July 4, 2005) was an American poet and critic. He was born in the Republic of Panama and grew up in New York City, where his family immigrated in 1948.

Life
Thomas was a graduate of Queens College in New York City. During his years there, he joined the Umbra Workshop, which drew young writers to the Lower East Side of New York City in search of their artistic voices. It served as a crucible for emerging black poets, among them Ishmael Reed, David Henderson and Calvin C. Hernton. The workshop was one of the currents that fed the Black Arts Movement of the '60s and '70s, the first major African-American artistic movement after the Harlem Renaissance.

For more than two decades a professor of English at the University of Houston–Downtown, Thomas also made important contributions to the study of African-American literature. In 2000, he published Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and 20th-Century American Poetry, his overview of the work of James Fenton and Amiri Baraka, among others.

Publications

 * Chances are Few (1st edition, 1980)
 * The Bathers (1981)
 * Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2000)
 * Chances are Few (expanded 2nd edition, 2003) (ISBN 0-912652-77-2)
 * Dancing on Main Street (2004)