Thomas Lux was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1946. He was educated at Emerson College and The University of Iowa. Most recently, Lux published The Cradle Place (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), a book of fifty-two new poems. His other books of poetry include The Street of Clocks (Houghton Mifflin, 2001); New and Selected Poems, 1975-1995 (1997), which was a finalist for the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The Blind Swimmer: Selected Early Poems, 1970-1975 (1996); Split Horizon (1994), for which he received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Pecked to Death by Swans (1993); A Boat in the Forest (1992); The Drowned River: New Poems (1990); Half Promised Land (1986); Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy (1983); Massachusetts (1981); Like a Wide Anvil from the Moon the Light (1980); Sunday (1979); Madrigal on the Way Home (1977); The Glassblower's Breath (1976); Memory's Handgrenade (1972); and The Land Sighted (1970). Thomas Lux also has edited The Sanity of Earth and Grass (1994, with Jane Cooper and Sylvia Winner) and has translated Versions of Campana (1977).

Lux was the poet in residence at Emerson College (1972-1975), and a member of the Writing Faculty at Sarah Lawrence College and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. He also taught at the Universities of Iowa, Michigan, and California at Irvine, among others. He was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry and received three National Endowment for the Arts grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Thomas Lux’s latest book is Selected Poems 1982-2012 (Bloodaxe, 2014). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published To the Left of Time in spring 2016. He also edited Bill Knott’s Selected Poems for Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2017), and was Bourne Professor of Poetry at Georgia Tech.