Thomas Glave papers

1990-2012

Thomas Glave is a writer, scholar, and social activist who has published four books of short fiction and essays exploring the experiences of LGBT people of color.

Thomas Glave, Jr. was born in Baychester, New York, on November 10, 1964. His father, Thomas "Ted" Glave, Sr., was a reporter for The Daily Gleaner in Kingston, Jamaica. As a child, Glave spent time in both Kingston, Jamaica, and the Bronx, New York. Upon graduating high school in 1982, he attended Bowdoin College for a year before pursuing a career as a professional dancer. In 1990, Glave stopped dancing professionally and returned to Bowdoin to continue his education. During the academic year 1991-1992, Glave traveled to Central and South America as part of an academic exchange program. He completed his degree in 1993, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in English with a minor in Latin American Studies.

For the next several years, Glave worked as a writer, receiving several fellowships to support his work from the Bronx Council for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and other sources. He published short stories in the Kenyon Review and other journals and also spent time living in both New York City and Jamaica. In 1996, he applied to the Brown University Creative Writing Program and was accepted. While completing his degree at Brown, Glave was awarded the 1997 O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction for his short story "The Final Inning". In 1998, he completed his MFA in Creative Writing at Brown and accepted a year long Fulbright fellowship in Jamaica, during which he helped found the first Jamaican LGBT rights advocacy group J-FLAG (Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals, and Gays). Upon his return from his Fulbright fellowship, Glave was hired as an Assistant Professor in the English Department of Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York.

His first book of short stories, Whose Song? and Other Stories was published in 2000. As a scholar, he edited the first anthology of Afro-Caribbean LGBT literaure, Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles. Glave published his first collection of non-fiction, Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent in 2005, which was awarded the 2006 Lambda Literary Award. Also in 2006, he was promoted to Associate Professor at Binghamton University.

In 2008, he published his second collection of short stories, The Torturer's Wife. During the 2008-2009 academic year, he was appointed to the prestigious Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was also promoted to Professor at Binghamton University. During 2011-2012, Glave was a visiting fellow at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. Glave's most recent collection of short stories, Among the Blood People, was published in 2013. He continues to serve as Professor of English at Binghamton University.