Thomas Lux (1946-2017) was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, to working-class parents. He was raised on a dairy farm. He studied at Emerson College, Boston, and later, briefly, at the University of Iowa. He taught for 27 years at Sarah Lawrence College, and did spells of teaching at many other universities across the States before becoming Bourne Professor of Poetry and director of Poetry@Tech at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
He published twelve collections of poetry. His "switchover" collection was Half Promised Land in 1986, which marked a sea change in his work. Split Horizon in 1994 won him the Kingsley-Tufts Award, making it possible for him to devote much more time and energy to his poetry at a crucial stage in the evolution of his work. His later books include New and Selected Poems 1975-1995, published in 1997, which shows the poet before and after his "recovery" from Surrealism, and was followed by The Street of Clocks (2001), The Cradle Place (2004), God Particles (2008), Child Made of Sand (2012) and To the Left of Time (2016). He published two books of poetry in Britain, The Street of Clocks - from Arc in 2001 - and his Selected Poems (2014) from Bloodaxe. He also edited I Am Flying Into Myself: Selected Poems of Bill Knott (2017).
