Biography
Thomas Devaney is a poet and a 2014 Pew Fellow. His poem "The Blue Stoop," published in BOMB Magazine, recently inspired a group of Philadelphia writers to name their literary hub Blue Stoop after the poem.
He has two forthcoming books in 2019: You Are the Battery (Black Square Editions), and Getting to Philadelphia: New and Selected Poems (Hanging Loose Press).
In the spring 2019 Devaney is teaching the course "Philadelphia: Inventing a City" for the new Tri-Co Philly Program, a joint project with Haverford, Bryn Mawr, and Swarthmore Colleges
Devaney is the author of Runaway Goat Cart (Hanging Loose Press, 2015), Calamity Jane (Furniture Press Books, 2014), The Picture that Remains (The Print Center, 2014), A Series of Small Boxes (Fish Drum, 2007), The American Pragmatist Fell in Love (Banshee Press, 1999), and a nonfiction book, Letters to Ernesto Neto (Germ Folios, 2005).
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 “Seven Writers” and "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.
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.
A Poetic Tribute to Haverford's Trees (spring 2010), a collaboration between Haverford's Arboretum Association and Thomas 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), and "The Impossible Prose Poem" (fall 2012).