Thylias Moss

1991 Winner in
Poetry

Thylias Moss was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on February 27, 1954. She earned a BA from Oberlin College and an MA from the University of New Hampshire. Her books of poetry include Wannabe Hoochie Mama Gallery of Realities' Red Dress Code (2016), Tokyo Butter (2006), Slave Moth: A Narrative in Verse (2004), Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler (1998), Small Congregations: New and Selected Poems (1993), Rainbow Remnants in Rock Bottom Ghetto Sky (1991), At Redbones (1990), Pyramid of Bone(1989), and Hosiery Seams on a Bowlegged Woman (1983). She is the author of a memoir, Tale of a Sky-Blue Dress (1998), and two plays, Talking to Myself (1984) and The Dolls in the Basement (1984). Among her honors are a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Dewar’s Profiles Performance Award, and a Witter Bynner Award for Poetry. She was featured in the PBS documentary The United States of Poetry. More recently, Thylias Moss discovered an enriched identity as forkergirl who in applying principles of Limited Fork Theory, the study of interacting systems, to thinking and making, produces systems of work (poams: products of act[s] of making) in which form is part of what emerges to be configured and reconfigured in collaborations with idea, access, limits and possibilities: sensory perception, time, (temporary) mergers, technologies, and space on multiple scales. Poams are both shifting (on some scale[s]) habitats and shifting (on some scale[s]) populations of habitats. To learn more, visit Limited Fork Theory at http://www.4orkology.com (also: Limited Fork Theory at http://www.4orked.com). Moss lives in Michigan.

Photo Credit:
Thylias Moss
Reviews & Praise

"Through the course of this emotionally arresting poetry sequence . . . it's that young woman's complexity and confusion that make Slave Moth one of the most profoundly startling and beautifully rendered of the neo-slave narratives." —The San Francisco Chronicle

"[Moss] is a poet of many gifts and she produces a poetry that takes risks. Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler is strikingly expansive . . . " —Judith Kitchen, The Georgia Review

“ . . . Moss ponders large philosophical questions like the nature of good and evil . . . her analysis of her own surrender is impressive in its depth and unwillingness to settle for the simple role of victim . . .” —Paula Friedman, The New York Times Book Review [on Tale of a Sky-Blue Dress]

“Thylias Moss is a poet who perpetually delights and astonishes me, with a wit comparable to that of Canadian poet Anne Carson. Her hallucinatory force is difficult to describe, her originality being so enormous.” —Harold Bloom, African-American Poets: Volume 2

Selected Works

read more >
Outside Links
Forkergirl Channel (Youtube)
Interview (Poetry Foundation)
Moss in The United States of Poetry