Author photo Joseph Earl Thomas

Photo by Marcus Jackson

Joseph Earl Thomas is the author of Sink, a memoir (Grand Central Publishing, 2022), longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and shortlisted for the Patrick Saroyan International Writing Prize; the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer (Grand Central Publishing, 2024), longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Literary Excellence, winner of the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize; and the forthcoming story collection Leviathan Beach (Grand Central, 2025). His prose and poetry has been published or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Harper’s, Virginia Quarterly Review, Vanity Fair, The Yale Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Dilettante Army. His honors include the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize, and fellowships from Kimbilio, VONA, Tin House and Bread Loaf. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s MFA program in prose, he earned his PhD in English from The University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College, and teaches courses in Black Studies, Poetics, Video Games, Queer Theory and more at The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.