Thomas Sayers Ellis’s books include Skin, Inc.: Identity Repair Poems (2010), The Maverick Room (2005), and The Good Junk (1996), all from Graywolf Press. He has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, a John C. Zacharis First Book Award, and fellowships and grants from The Fine Arts Work Center, the Ohio Arts Council, Yaddo, and The MacDowell Colony. His Breakfast and Blackfist: Notes for Black Poets is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press. He is a contributing editor to Callaloo and Poets & Writers magazine.

Photograph by Lynda Koolish