Thomas Lynch is the author of six books of essays, a book of short fictions and six books of poetry. The Depositions, New & Selected Essays, was published by W.W. Norton late in 2019. David R. Godine published Bone Rosary – New & Selected Poems in 2021 and his first novel, No Prisoners, in September 2025. His work is published in eight languages and has been broadcast by BBC Radio, NPR and RTE in Ireland. He has read and lectured across the United States, the UK, Ireland and Australia. He is the recipient of the American Book Award, The Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, The Denise Levertov Award, The Great Lakes Book Award, Michigan Authors Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Thomas Lynch's work has been the subject of two film documentaries. PBS Frontline's "The Undertaking," aired nationwide in 2007 and won the 2008 Emmy Award for Arts and Culture Documentary. Cathal Black's film, "Learning Gravity," produced for the BBC, was featured at the 2008 Telluride Film Festival and the 6th Traverse City Film Festival in 2009 where it was awarded the Michigan Prize by Michael Moore.
Thomas Lynch has taught with the Department of Mortuary Science at Wayne State University in Detroit, with the graduate program in writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and with the Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA. He is a charter member of the faculty of the Bear River Writers' Conference at Walloon Lake in Michigan.
Thomas Lynch's essays, poems and stories have appeared in The Atlantic and Granta, The New York Times and Times of London, The New Yorker, Poetry, Harpers, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. He keeps home on Mullett Lake and in Milford, Michigan, where he has been the funeral director since 1974, and in Moveen, Co. Clare, Ireland, where he keeps an ancestral home and has spent a portion of every year since 1970.
Workshop
Genre Bending: Getting the Most from Your Work in Words
This workshop will look at ways a writer might take full advantage of different genres and forms to get the most out of our very best notions. Participants will be encouraged to work outside their comfortable writerly ranges, to create new work by self-tasking and outside direction. Participants will generally work on prompts outside of class and bring their drafts to workshop.
