Biography
Thomas Devaney is a poet and writer. He is the author of five poetry collections, 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 is the recipient of a Pew Fellowship in the Arts (2014). Other awards include, Banff Centre Fellow 2016, MacDowell Colony Fellowships (2015, 2006), and a summer residency at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France by the French American Cultural Exchange (FACE) (2008).
He was featured on WHYY TV-12’s Friday Arts Program for his work as a teacher as well as his book, The Picture that Remains. He is the editor of ONandOnScreen, an e-journal featuring poems and videos.
Projects with the Institute of Contemporary Art include “Seven Writers,” (2014); "Tales from the 215" for "Philadelphia Freedom" with Zoe Strauss (2006); 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).
Devaney 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).