Biography

Thomas Devaney is the author of Getting to Philadelphia (Hanging Loose Press, 2019), and the recipient of 2014 Pew Fellowship for Poetry. In November 2019 Black Square Editions will publish You Are the Battery.  He is co-director of the documentary The Bicentennial in Philadelphia (slated for 2020).

Devaney’s work is featured in Best American Poetry 2019, and his poem "The Blue Stoop," inspired a group of Philadelphia writers to name their literary hub Blue Stoop after the poem.

Other books include, Runaway Goat Cart, the solo-opera Calamity Jane, and The Picture that Remains with photographer Will Brown. Devaney’s reviews and interviews  have been published in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Brooklyn Rain, Hyperallergic, and BOMB Magazine. 

In the spring 2019 Devaney taught  "Philadelphia: Inventing a City" for the Tri-Co Philly Program.

Devaney was featured on WHYY TV-12’s Friday Arts Program for his book, The Picture that Remains. Projects with the Institute of Contemporary Art include "Tales from the 215" for "Philadelphia Freedom" with Zoe Strauss. Other projects include poems written for "Common Ground: Eight Philadelphia Photographers in the 1960s and 1970s" at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

A Poetic Tribute to Haverford's Trees (spring 2010), a collaboration between Haverford's Arboretum Association and Devaney's Poetry Workshop led to "Under an Oak: A Tree Poetry Tour," in which workshop students read their original poems dedicated to campus trees. Other student-based projects/programs include INSIDE photographs/poems, with the poetry workshop and Vita Litvak's photography class (spring 2104).

He taught and worked at the University of Pennsylvania for nine years. From 2001 to 2005 he was program coordinator of the Kelly Writers House. He was awarded a Distinguished Teaching Award from Penn's Critical Writing Program in 2008.

Devaney earned his MFA in Creative Writing at Brooklyn College, CUNY in 1998.