It’s rare – but when poetry and photography come together, the result is beautiful. Florida Museum of Photographic Arts (FMoPA) provided the community this unique opportunity with Thomas Sayers Ellis, St. Petersburg’s first photo laureate, poet and bandleader in-residence.
The community was treated to lectures, photo analysis and poetry writing/discussions by Ellis, who is the author of “The Maverick Room,” “Skin, Inc: Identity Repair Poems,” and “Mexico, A Book of Photographs.”He was in residence to write poems and absorb the energy and ideas in his exhibition, Paradise | Paradise Layered.
“Everyone was impressed with Ellis’s attentiveness and personable nature. Many entrants left purchasing Eliss’s books and were delighted to attend,” said Lucas Campoe, communications manager for FMoPA.
“One notable entrant brought a stack of postcards for a group that she was in, where people from all over the world write poems on postcards and send them to each other, with the goal of sending one postcard to each member by the end of the year (about 30 members). She sat with Ellis, for about an hour, going through the ones she had written for her friends around the world,” he added.
Named the first Photo Laureate of St Petersburg, in 2023, Elliot co-founded The Dark Room Collective and The Dark Room Reading Series, in 1989, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His poems and photographs have appeared in numerous journals, including The Paris Review, Poetry, The Nation and Best American Poetry (1997, 2001, 2010, 2015). In 2015, he co-founded Heroes Are Gang Leaders (HAGL), a literary Free Jazz band of artists who were awarded the American Book Award for Oral Literature, in 2018. Having recorded six CDs to date, HAGL has performed in Paris, Berlin, Gdansk, The Hague, New York City and Lisbon. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in Poetry. His most recent book is Crank Shaped Notes (Arrowsmith Press, 2021).
You can learn more about FMoPA’s upcoming events here.