Works by
Thomas Glave
(Writer)

Fiction

• Whose Song?  And Other Stories (2000) -- Nominated American Library Association Best Gay/Lesbian Book of the Year award
  Whose Song? And Other Stories is the literary debut of a talented young writer, Thomas Glave. His writing is marked by an energy, an ambition, and a fearlessness that are all too rare.

  Threads of African American and gay experience, as well as Caribbean and Caribbean-American culture and history connect these stories, set in the Bronx and other parts of New York City, Boston, the American South, and the Caribbean. "Commitment" takes place on the day before a wedding in the rural South. Two young black men are forced to end their clandestine relationship as the father of one of them threatens to kill them both. In "Their Story," two elderly men, one from Jamaica and the other from the South, lose their wives and find comfort with each other. "—And Love Them?" is the one-sided dialogue of a white woman, an office worker who tries to communicate her conflicted feelings toward "them," that is, the black people she encounters at her job, on the streets of New York, and in her imagination. And "The Pit" is a haunting, harrowing tale about a young Caribbean boy who visits the site of an enormous killing field and returns to his terrorized village endowed with prop! hetic powers.

  Thomas Glave is a deft stylist, and each of the nine stories in this collection reveals yet another of his successful technical experiments.

Non-fiction

• Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent (2005) -- Winner 2005 Lambda Literary Award for Nonfiction
  “As a black male who is also gay, I and my brothers and our black lesbian sisters are considered ‘disposables’ throughout the world, throughout time past and present, in our own black communities and in white ones. This is clearly the case in Jamaica and most other Caribbean nations, and it is certainly true in the supposedly more ‘progressive’ United States. What will the force of this virulent hatred mean for our futures, and who will decide once again which of us is disposable? And: will we stand together when the time comes for us to face that machine-gun fire? All of us? Beyond our prejudices?” 
  
  In these lyrical and powerful essays, Thomas Glave draws on his experiences as a politically committed, gay Jamaican American to deliver a searing condemnation of the prejudices, hatreds, and inhumanities that persist in the United States and elsewhere as both official policy and social reality. Exposing the hypocrisies and contradictions of liberal multiculturalism, Glave offers instead a politics of heterogeneity in which difference informs the theory and practice of democracy. At the same time, he experiments with language and form, blurring the lines between fiction and nonfiction, to provide a compelling model of creative writing as a tool for social change and humanity. 
  
  From the death of black gay poet Essex Hemphill to the revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib, Glave puts forth a deeply moral and ethical understanding of human rights to make vital connections across nations, races, genders, and sexualities. 

See also:

• Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the  Antilles (2007 release), Thomas Glave, ed.