Larry D. Thomas, 2008 Poet Laureate of Texas

Larry D. Thomas, born and reared in West Texas, has resided in Houston since 1967. He moved from West Texas to Houston at the age of twenty to complete his college education, and graduated from the University of Houston in 1970 with a BA degree in English literature. In 1998, he retired from a career in adult criminal justice, the last fifteen years of which he served as a branch director for the Harris County Adult Probation Department (Houston). Since his retirement, he has been employed as a full-time poet.

Mr. Thomas started writing poetry seriously in the early 1970’s during his four-year tour of duty in the U. S. Navy. He spent his entire tour in Norfolk, Virginia, serving as a correctional counselor in the Navy prison. Immediately after his stint in the Navy, he secured employment with the Harris County Adult Probation Department where he rose from the rank of probation officer first to unit supervisor and ultimately to branch director, the position he maintained until his retirement in 1998. He wrote consistently on weekends during his thirty-one year career in social service and adult criminal justice, and was quite successful during that period of time in placing his poems in numerous respected national literary journals. His first collection of poetry, The Lighthouse Keeper, was published by Timberline Press in late 2000, approximately three years after his retirement, and was selected by the Small Press Review as a “pick-of-the-issue” (May/June 2001). He has since that time published six additional collections of poems which have received several prestigious prizes and awards.

Mr. Thomas is married to Lisa Parker Thomas, D.D.S, and has one adult daughter, Deena.

The Lighthouse Keeper (Timberline Press 2001)

“Larry Thomas has the limberness and attention of a poet who produces daily. Nothing is beneath his interest, and in his confident hands we discover nothing is beneath ours, either. His choice of metaphor ranges omnivorously from Medusa, Jonah, Comanche, and horror story to a casual reference to melanoma or the simple description of a little boy’s kite as “stinking new.” You are reassured by the realization that he will go wherever he must to transfer the totality of what he is seeing into bites we can savor and shunt down the line to nourish our cells.”

Maggie Jochild, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review (No. 17 Fall/Winter 2001)

Amazing Grace (Texas Review Press 2001)

“As promised in the title, the poems of Amazing Grace are rendered with a poise that almost belies the strength of the language and images from which they are made. Thomas has captured the spirit that underlies the physical geography of the land and the hearts of the people who have helped to shape it. In the dust from which his characters spring, and in the “rich / red fields / of deep lineage” that so patiently await their return, lie the beginning and end of us all.”



Andrew Geyer, Iron Horse Literary Review (Spring Thaw 2002)