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Thom Tammaro (pronounced TAM-a-row) was born and raised in the heart of the steel valley of western Pennsylvania. He retired in 2017, after thirty-four years of teaching at Minnesota State University Moorhead, where he was Professor of English and co-founder and director of the MFA in Creative Writing program. In 2001, he was named a Roland and Beth Dille Distinguished Faculty Lecturer. He lives in Moorhead, MN.
His poems, essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, among them American Poetry Review; Bless Me, Father; The Bloomsbury Review; Chicago Review; The Chronicle of Higher Educatio;, College Composition and Communication; The Emily Dickinson Journal; Essays from Contemporary Culture; Great River Review; Italian Americana; Midwest Quarterly; A Multicultural Reader; North Dakota Quarterly; Primo; Quarterly West; South Dakota Review; The Steinbeck Quarterly; The Sun: A Magazine of Ideas; University of Windsor Review; and VIA: Voices in Italian Americana. Garrison Keillor has featured his poems on The Writer's Almanac. You can listen to Keillor read Tammaro's poems here:
https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2007%252F03%252F04.html
https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2012%252F09%252F14.html
His own collections of poems include Italian Days & Hours (2020), 23 Poems (2016), Holding on for Dear Life (2004), and When the Italians Came to My Home Town (1995), finalist for a Minnesota Book Award.
He is the recipient of fellowships in poetry from the Minnesota State Arts Board, a Loft-McKnight Award in Poetry, and a Jerome Foundation Travel and Writing Fellowship to Italy. In 2009 he was the recipient of the Lake Region Arts Council—McKnight Fellowship in Poetry.
Edited anthologies include Invisible World: Fifty Tiny Poems of Walt Whitman (co-edited with Sheila Coghill, 2022), and Visiting Bob: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Bob Dylan (100 poems by 100 poets), co-edited with Alan Davis (2018).
With Joyce Sutphen & Connie Wanek, he co-edited To Sing Along the Way: Minnesota Women Poets from Pre-Territorial Days to the Present (2006), recipient of the 2007 Midwest Booksellers’ Honor Award for Poetry and the 2007 WILLA Award for Poetry from the Women Writing the West Association.
With Sheila Coghill, he co-edited Visiting Dr. Williams: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of William Carlos Williams (2011); Visiting Frost: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Robert Frost (2005); Visiting Walt: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Walt Whitman, a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award (2003), and Visiting Emily: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Emily Dickinson (2000), winner of a Minnesota Book Award, all published by the University of Iowa Press.
And with Mark Vinz, he co-edited Imagining Home: Writing from the Midwest (1995) and Inheriting the Land: Contemporary Voices from the Midwest (1995), both published by the University of Minnesota Press, and both winners of Minnesota Book Awards.
He has also edited Remembering James Wright by Robert Bly (1991) and Roving Across Fields: A Conversation with William Stafford and Uncollected Poems 1942-1982 (1983).