06-27-2024 Howard - Flipbook - Page 44
workshops led by author and poet Tony Medina,
Thomas got an MFA in poetry at New England
College. He joined the Howard County Poetry
& Literature Society, where he was formerly
a writer-in-residence and a member of the
advisory group.
“D.C. shaped me as an artist. Howard shaped
me very much,” he said.
Recently, he’s taken to photographing and
writing about the different neighborhoods of
D.C. — “going to every part of it, the roughest
parts and the most genteel, to write about the
dichotomy that exists,” he said.
In Howard County, he does much of his
writing at Savage Mill and Martin Luther King,
Jr. Community Church.
As poet laureate, he’s interested in launching
a series of writing workshops, where he’ll
teach forms of verse including his own, called
“Skinny” poetry, which he said consists of 11
lines and has its own set of rules.
“I just want people to write whatever is on
their hearts,” he said. “Although it’s true Howard
County has pockets of great diversity … we’re
in America, and we have challenges, like every
other part of America.”
Hart described Truth’s poetry as facing headon “the ways in which we are divided.” West
said he is “soft spoken, but he has really great
power in his words.”
As poet laureate, Thomas is interested in
launching a series of writing workshops, where
he’ll teach forms of verse including his own, called
“Skinny”poetry. PHOTO BY KIM HAIRSTON
Thomas’ work “speaks to the times, not just
the county,” Miller said.
In a poem titled “On Holy War,” Thomas
writes: “… A headless boy stops and asks me /
if he’s Israeli or a Palestinian’s son, and which /
of the bullets that struck him, was the holy one.”
Various organizations have requested
Thomas’s presence at their events, Hart said.
At Books in Bloom, a Columbia literary event
that included readings from Thomas and others,
he recalled a young attendee who said poetry
was “cool.”
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| Summer 2024 | howardmagazine.com
“People want to be
connected. They want to
be inspired. They want to
have their hopes, dreams,
aspirations, their pain,
their passions to be heard
and conveyed in ways
that a poet laureate can
help communicate and
articulate.”
— Howard County Executive
Calvin Ball
Howard County’s new youth poet laureate
position, planned as a one-year term with a
$500 honorarium, will begin in August and will
give the poet an opportunity to “be a voice of a
generation that is too often unheard,” Ball said.
Thomas, with the bulk of his tenure still
ahead of him, is part of a blossoming poetry
network in Howard County.
Speaking about being the first, he referenced
a line by the late poet and author Maya Angelou
when he said “Nobody makes it all alone.”
