Michael Thomas

Acclaimed Novelist & Memoirist
Winner of IMPAC Dublin Award

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  • An Evening with Michael Thomas

Biography

“A writer of enthralling voice and startling insight.” — IMPAC Dublin Judges Citation 

“Michael Thomas is brilliant. Every page vibrates with love and anger and hope.” —Elizabeth Gaffney

“Thomas’s blues-dirge-y storytelling instincts keep the narrative thrumming.” —People

Michael Thomas is the author of the debut novel Man Gone Down (Grove/Atlantic, 2007), a beautifully written, insightful, and devastating book that follows a 35-year-old African American man, broke and estranged from his white wife and three children, who has four days to keep his family afloat and reclaim his stake in the American Dream. Donna Seaman wrote, “Thomas has written a rhapsodic and piercing post-9/11 lament over aggression, greed, and racism, and a ravishing blues for the soul’s unending loneliness.”

Thomas’s memoir, The Broken King (Grove/Atlantic, 2017), about four generations of men in his family, traces the lives of these men against the backdrop of the last century-and-a-half in American history. From Reconstruction to the Jim Crow South and the Civil Rights movement, Thomas explores fathers and sons, lovers and beloved, trauma and recovery, race and deracination, success and failure, soccer, and the Boston Red Sox in a beautiful and unique memoir.

Man Gone Down  was selected as one of the New York Times Book Review’s top five novels of the year, as well as a New York Times Notable Book, and a San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book. In June 2009, Thomas was awarded the prestigious IMPAC Dublin Literary Award — which the New York Times cited as “the largest and most international literary prize in the world after the Nobel.” His book was selected from 145 nominations around the globe, of which four were from the US. The Judges wrote in their Citation that Man Gone Down is: “brilliant in its scope and energy, and deeply moving in its human warmth.” The judges continue: “Thomas’ novel shows, in unsentimental clarity, the way the future can close mercilessly on those marginalized by race and social circumstance. ‘Not a train,’ as he writes about the cadences of the blues, ‘but something coming down the track under its own unconscious locomotion.’”

Thomas received his BA from Hunter College and his MFA from Warren Wilson College. Currently, he is a full-time professor of English at Hunter College. An eloquent and charismatic speaker, Thomas easily addresses a wide variety of topics.

Born and raised in Boston, he lives in Brooklyn with his wife and children.

Short Bio

Michael Thomas is the author of The Broken King, a memoir about four generations of men in his family, and the novel Man Gone Down, winner of the prestigious IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Man Gone Down was also selected as one of the New York Times Book Review’s top five novels of the year and was a Notable Book by both the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle. Thomas received his BA from Hunter College and his MFA from Warren Wilson College and is a full-time professor of English at Hunter College.

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