Joseph Earl Thomas
(he/him/his)
Dissertation Advisor(s): Simone White
"Black Affect and Ludonarrative Dissonance in the Present"
Joseph Earl Thomas is a writer from Frankford whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in VQR, N+1, Gulf Coast, The Offing, and The Kenyon Review. He has an MFA in prose from The University of Notre Dame and is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania. An excerpt of his memoir, Sink, (Grand Central Publishing 2023) won the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize and he has received fellowships from Fulbright, VONA, Tin House, & Breadloaf though he is now the Anisfield-Wolf Fellow for the CSU Poetry Center.. He’s writing the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, and a collection of stories: Leviathan Beach, among other oddities. He is an associate faculty member at The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, as well as Director of Programs at Blue Stoop, a literary hub for Philly writers.
I also teach courses at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research on:
Theory and Play: An Introduction to Video Game Studies
African American Literature in the 21st Century
Black Speculative Literature
Anime
Afropessimism