Postscripts: Zacharis Award Winner Thomas Sayers Ellis

Zacharis Award Ploughshares is pleased to present Thomas Sayers Ellis with the sixteenth annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for his collection of poems, The Maverick Room (Graywolf, 2005). The $1,500 award, which is named after Emerson College's former president, honors the best debut book by a Ploughshares writer, alternating annually between poetry and fiction.

This year's judge was the poet John Skoyles, who is a Ploughshares trustee. In choosing the collection, Skoyles said: "In The Maverick Room, Thomas Sayers Ellis jostles sound and sense and comes up with a new and winning combination of both. These poems sing and whisper, shout and confide, in the same unmistakable voice. Lyric and narrative strains fuse in poem after poem, making the collection as far-reaching as it is profound."

Thomas Sayers Ellis's recent publications include Poetry, Tin House, Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, Zoland Poetry, and Under the Rock Umbrella: Contemporary Poets from 1951–1977. He has received a Whiting Writer's Award and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. He has published two chapbooks, The Good Junk in 1996, which was included in the Agni/Graywolf series Take Three, and The Genuine Negro Hero in 2001, from Kent State University, and a chaplet, Song On, in 2005, from WinteRed Press. He has also co-edited the anthology On the Verge: Emerging Poets and Artists (Faber & Faber) and edited the forthcoming Quotes Community: Notes for Black Poets (Michigan).

Ellis was born in 1963 in Washington, D.C., where his mother was a swing manager at McDonald's and his father worked for the city reading water meters. Ellis's two great childhood ambitions were to draw and to be a football player, "specifically a great halfback," he says, "a runner, like Gale Sayers, who I was named after, because of my speed, which should explain my prosody." At Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, he didn't play football, but was a swimmer, the editor of the school newspaper, and the president of the creative writing club. He also played the timbales and other percussion instruments for local go-go bands.

For several years, Ellis attended Harvard, but never received his degree. "I was a passionate student who could only commit to the subjects I was interested in: literature and cinema." He received quite an education in those two fields, studying with Seamus Heaney, serving as a teaching assistant for Spike Lee, and working as a projectionist at the Harvard Film Archive. He also worked at two bookstores, the Grolier Poetry Book Shop and Trident Booksellers, and while living in Cambridge co-founded The Dark Room Collective, a network of African-American poets that included Sharan Strange, Kevin Young, Natasha Trethewey, John Keene, Tracy K. Smith, and Major Jackson. The Collective became famous for its lively, standing-room-only readings, which mixed emerging writers with established poets, backed by jazz performances; it was the sole reading series in the Boston area devoted to writers of color. After Cambridge, Ellis went to Brown University and studied with Michael S. Harper, receiving his M.F.A. in 1995—"the two quickest years of my life," he says.

His first publications were in Agni and Callaloo, pretty much simultaneously, a day or two apart. "I met the editors of both of these journals in places where I should not have been," Ellis recalls, "so I would advise young writers not to try to control and calculate their paths too much, to shoot for a balance of accident and aim." His other early publications were in The Kenyon Review and Grand Street, and then in APR, The Pushcart Prize, and twice in The Best American Poetry.

"I am influenced by everything I come in contact with," Ellis says, "and most of my work is about not making distinctions, of eliminating false boundaries. My major influences are noises and gesture and other pre-language behaviors. The Maverick Room is an attempt to order the chaos and chaos the order of my relationships to Washington, D.C., and poetry. I wanted to create the beginnings of a percussive prosody that was governed by more than literary intelligence and logical lyrical progression sprinkled with similes. I wanted to begin the process of being courageous and honest enough to commit to a risk in every room. And, well, like the speaker from 'Hush Yo Mouf,' I failed."

Formerly an associate professor at Case Western Reserve University, Ellis is now teaching at Sarah Lawrence College and in Lesley University's low-residency M.F.A. program. He lives in New York City and is working on a new manuscript, Colored Only: Identity Repair Poems.