Thomas Sayers Ellis was born and raised in Washington, DC. His first full collection, The Maverick Room, (Graywolf Press, 2005) received a Mrs. Giles Whiting Writers’ Award and the 2006 John C. Zacharis First Book Award. Graywolf Press recently published Skin, Inc. a collection of poetry. He co-founded The Dark Room Collective in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1988, and earned an MFA from Brown University in 1995. His writing has appeared in The Nation, The Paris Review, Poetry, Tin House and Best American Poetry (1997, 2001, 2010 and 2015). In 2011, he exhibited the first photographic one-man show of go-go music titled “(Un)Lock It: the Percussive People in the Go-Go Pocket.” He has taught at Howard University, Sarah Lawrence College, The University of San Francisco and the University of Montana. Recently he co-founded Heroes Are Gang Leaders, a language/music group of poets and musicians, and recorded “Chuck Town” (for Chuck Brown) and was, shortly thereafter, awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry. www.tsellis.com