| Abstract | In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Callaloo 23.4 (2000) 1227-1240 Thomas Glave within the past decade has earned a reputation as one of the most gifted, innovative, and important writers of fiction to emerge on the American literary scene. While an outstanding author of nonfictional essays and an eloquent public speaker on art, the African Diaspora, and Black Queer Studies, Glave's career is distinguished most by his inventive and acclaimed short stories set in the Bronx and other parts of New York, Boston, the U.S. South, and the Caribbean. These stories have appeared in eminent journals, magazines, and anthologies published not only in the United States but all around the world. In light of his personal history, his numerous honors, awards, and fellowships, his diverse professional accomplishments, and his increasing fame as a literary artist, a nonfictional writer, and an intellectual activist concerned with issues of HIV/AIDS and with the intersection of Black Studies and Queer Studies, one can certainly agree with the recent announcement of the Village Voice Literary Supplement (June 2000) that Glave is "on the verge of making an impact on the literary landscape." Son of the late former Jamaica Gleaner reporter Thomas Edward Glave, Sr., and nephew of the former Gleaner writer and Jamaica Public Service Corporation executive Halman Glave, Thomas Glave was born on November 10, 1964, in Baychester, New York City. He grew up in the Bronx and in Kingston, Jamaica. For Dance Theater of Harlem he danced off and on throughout the 1980s; in this decade he also enrolled in Bowdoin College, where in 1993 he earned a bachelor of arts, cum laude, in English with a minor in Latin American Studies. In the summer of that year he also became a James Michener Scholar at the Caribbean Writers' Institute, University of Miami, and earned an Academy of American Poets Prize. For the early part of the 1990s Glave performed HIV/AIDS educational outreach for Gay Men's Health Crisis and for the Minority Task Force on AIDS in New York City, and in 1995 he worked at an AIDS Hospice on behalf of Jamaica AIDS Support in Kingston. While busy performing this volunteer work as well as temporary jobs, Glave continued to produce, publish, and receive accolades for his literary art. In 1992 and 1994 he received a Poetry Fellowship and a Fiction Fellowship, respectively, from the Bronx Council on the Arts. In 1994 he also received a National Endowment for the Arts/Travel Grants Fund for Artists, an award which helped to pay his research expenses in Jamaica, and he became a writer-in-residence at Altos de Chavon in the Dominican Republic. In 1995 he received not only a Creative Nonfiction Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts (which in 2000 would additionally grant him a Fiction Fellowship) but also a Fiction Fellowship from the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Shortly after his time in Provincetown, Glave matriculated at Brown University's Master in Fine Arts program in creative writing. While taking classes there, he taught in both the English Department and the Creative Writing Program; he also served briefly as Upper School Teacher of composition and creative writing at Moses Brown School in Providence, Rhode Island. In 1997 his short story "The Final Inning," which initially appeared in The Kenyon Review, won an O. Henry Award, widely considered the most prestigious annual honor for writers of short fiction in the United States. Glave became the nineteenth black writer to win the award since the competition's inauguration in 1919, the first black gay writer since James Baldwin in 1959, and the very first author of a black gay-themed short story. Just prior to his graduation from Brown in Spring 1998 he also won a Fulbright fellowship, which he used to study Jamaican historiography and Jamaican-Caribbean intellectual and literary traditions. While in Jamaica he co-founded and participated in the Jamaica Forum of Lesbians, All-Sexuals, and Gays (J-FLAG). Upon his return to the United States, he began his currently held position as assistant professor of English and Africana Studies at the State University of New York, Binghamton. Glave's fiction has been published in...
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