Joseph Earl Thomas
“Writing is a constant struggle with the given, the ideology of the day, the politics of power, the history of languages both distal and proximate. At best we might throw into relief the local process through which we make culture, and its myriad conflicts with what we call reality.”
“Magnificent...Thomas scales great heights with this innovative blend of social realism and surrealism.”
“Joseph Earl Thomas’s God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer is a brilliant novel of hunger and work and care and grief that deftly captures the maddening mess of everything that makes life worth living. Thomas is a skilled, surgical prose stylist; his sentences are magnificent scalpels. There isn’t a single dull line in the book. God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer is unpredictable, unsentimental, and impressively tender.”
“Thomas really does accomplish the extraordinary…[He] has constructed a sort of alchemy on the page, but one born of experience, from skill and from a trust about what will end up on the other side…perhaps one of the biggest boons of Sink is its insistence that care is, above all, shared. It is everyone’s prerogative. In this way, Thomas has earned a deep bow. ”
“For the reader, third-person narration creates a buffer to a brutal coming of age, and perhaps allows Thomas enough distance from his trauma to bravely expose the vulnerability and resilience of his youth.”
“Joseph Earl Thomas’s Sink is a powerful, moving, and artful testament to the sustaining powers of the imagination. This compelling coming-of-age memoir is often brutal but also loving; it’s at turns critical, empathic, funny; it’s searching and revelatory the whole way through. Joey is a narrator for the ages, a boy whose unforgettable story dares expanding the possibilities of Black male identity.
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Joseph Earl Thomas is the author of Sink: A Memoir (Grand Central Publishing, 2022) a New York Times Notable Book, and the forthcoming novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, which will be published by Grand Central Publishing in June, 2024. His writing has been published in The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Dilettante Army, and The New York Times Book Review. His honors include the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize, and fellowships from Kimbilio, VONA, Tin House and Bread Loaf.
Asked in an interview about the challenges of writing a memoir at a young age, Thomas responded: I don’t necessarily see any cons. I felt like I waited quite a long time to do it. The book took shape over the course of eight or nine years or so. I tried to be as careful as I could while being as honest as I could and being as serious about craft, and attention to detail and form, as I could. One of the pros for me is that most of the people in the book are still alive, so they could read or listen to it, and I could talk about it with my friends and family. That was super important to me. My children can have a firmer understanding of my own childhood as well, because they always have lots of questions. I don’t placate or lie to them. I will tell them my opinion and be clear about the fact that what I’m saying is my opinion and not some kind of universal fact.”
A graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s MFA program in prose, he is completing a PhD in English at The University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College, and teaches courses in Black Studies, Poetics, and Video Games at The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
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