Thomas Devaney
Thomas Devaney is the author of six books, including Getting to Philadelphia (Hanging Loose Press, 2019), You Are the Battery (Black Square Editions, 2019), and The Picture that Remains, a collaboration with photographer Will Brown (The Print Center, 2014). He wrote and co-directed the film Bicentennial City (2020), which is an exploration of the legacy of Philadelphia’s 1976 Bicentennial celebration. Devaney is a Pew Fellow in the Arts and published in Best American Poetry and the Brooklyn Rail. The lit hub Blue Stoop : A Home for Philly was named after his poem “The Blue Stoop.” Devaney teaches creative writing at Haverford College and works at the Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation at Drexel University.
Thomas Devaney is a poet who lives in Philadelphia. He is the author of Runaway Goat Cart (Hanging Loose Press, 2015), the solo-opera Calamity Jane (Furniture Press Books, 2014), The Picture that Remains with photographer Will Brown (The Print Center, 2014), Letters to Ernesto Neto (Germ Folios, 2005), and The American Pragmatist Fell in Love (Banshee Press, 1999). Projects with the Institute of Contemporary Art include, “Tales from the 215,” for Zoe Strauss’s “Philadelphia Freedom” and “The Empty House,” at the Edgar Allan Poe House for The Big Nothing.
Talking to Bill Berkson was one of the great pleasures of my life. The following is an excerpt of a longer interview I recorded at his home in San Francisco in March 2015. There was always stirring sense in the conversation with Berkson that the arts are relevant to how a life can be lived.