Thomas Devaney is a poet and educator based in Philadelphia and a Pew Fellow in the Arts. He wrote and co-directed the film Bicentennial City (2020) with Greenhouse Media. He is the author of Getting to Philadelphia  (Hanging Loose Press, 2019) and You Are the Battery (Black Square Editions, 2019). His books include Runaway Goat Cart (Hanging Loose Press, 2015), The Picture that Remains, with the photographer Will Brown (The Print Center, 2014), the solo-opera Calamity Jane (Furniture Press Books, 2014), A Series of Small Boxes (Fish Drum, 2007) and The American Pragmatist Fell in Love (Banshee Press, 1999).

Devaney’s poem “Brilliant Corners,” was selected for The Best American Poetry 2019. His poem “The Blue Stoop,” which is in conversation with a photograph by Zoe Strauss, is the adopted name of a community literary hub founded Blue Stoop in Philadelphia in 2018. His conceptual-based project The Empty House Tour at the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site, for the ICA’s The Big Nothing in 2004, started Devaney down a path of exploring Edgar Poe. His reviews and interviews have been published in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Brooklyn Rain, Hyperallergic, BOMB Magazine, Rain Taxi, and The American Poetry Review. Poems, audio, and videos on the web, Devaney Online.

In 2001, Devaney joined the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. For an active four years, he was the program coordinator and producer of the radio program “Live at the Writers House” on 88.5-FM WXPN. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing at Brooklyn College, CUNY. He teaches at Haverford College.