Thomas Devaney is poet, teacher, and critic. He is the author of two poetry collections A Series of Small Boxes (Fish Drum, 2007) and The American Pragmatist Fell in Love (Banshee Press, 1999), and a nonfiction book, Letters to Ernesto Neto (Germ Folios, 2005).
Devaney is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Haverford College. Projects at Haverford include Our Emily Dickinson, Cell Phone Formalism, and the poetry tree tour "Under An Oak" collaboration with the Haverford Arboretum Association. From 2005-2010 he was a Senior Writing Fellow in the Critical Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Devaney taught in Penn's Creative Writing Program from 2003-2010. In 2008 he was awarded a Distinguished Teaching Award from the Critical Writing Program. Since 2009 he has taught summer graduate seminars in the Master of Liberal Arts Program for Penn's College of LPS.
In 2001 Devaney joined the Kelly Writers House, Penn's literary hub, for an active four years as program coordinator and producer of the monthly radio program "Live at the Writers House" on 88.5-FM WXPN. He received his MFA in Creative Writing at Brooklyn College, CUNY in 1998, where he was a student of Allen Ginsberg and L.S. Asekoff.
Devaney's poems have been published in The American Poetry Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, jubliat, The AWL, and at PennSound. Anthologies include A Best of FENCE: The First Nine Years (FENCE Books, 2009), POEM: Poets On (an) Exchange Mission (Fish Drum/Double Change, 2009 bilingual French-English edition), Walt Whitman, Hom(m)age, 2005/1855 (Turtle Point Press and Editions Joca Seria, 2005) and American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon, 2000).
In 2009 he was awarded a summer residency at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France by the French American Cultural Exchange (FACE). He was a Fellow at The MacDowell Colony in 2006.
Devaney criticism spans from Poe and the Symbolist, to the Objectivist and mid-Century New American poetry, on to work charting a diverse spectrum of contemporary writers and art practices. He has also written on the Objectivist poet Carl Rakosi. In 2008 he edited a feature issue of Jacket Magazine on the poet George Oppen. His reviews and essays have been published in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Jacket, The Boston Review, and Rain Taxi.
Projects with the Institute of Contemporary Art include "New Invisible Cities," for "The Puppet Show" (2008); "No Silence Here, Enjoy the Silence," for "Locally Localized Gravity" (2007); "Tales from the 215" for "Philadelphia Freedom" with Zoe Strauss (2006); poems written after Troy Brauntuch for "Springtide" (2005); and the participant-performance project "The Empty House" at the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site for "The Big Nothing" (2004). Other projects include poems written for "Common Ground: Eight Philadelphia Photographers in the 1960s and 1970s" at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2009).
For current updates, check Thomas Devaney's blog at thomasdevaney.blogspot.com.
Photo by Zoe Strauss