Thomas Sayers Ellis - TO WATCH

By Robin O'Dell

In 2022, Conde Nast Traveler magazine called St. Petersburg a small city with a big-time art scene. Part of the delight of becoming an arts destination is that the area’s draw for creatives to move and live here is expanding. On a regular basis I meet truly talented people who have decided to call St. Petersburg home.

One such person has not only moved to the area but is little by little becoming an integral part of the arts scene here. His name is Thomas Sayers Ellis, and if you haven’t heard of him yet, you soon will.

Ellis won the competition to be named by the St. Pete Month of Photography as the first Photo Laureate of St. Petersburg. This honor will culminate with an exhibition in May of 2024. He has also been given a grant and named as a 2023/2024 Emerging Artist with the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance, an honor given to mid-career artists to enable them to augment their careers with a specific goal, a mentor, and funds to do so. Ellis’s career is well beyond the mid-career benchmark, but it is wonderful that Pinellas County is helping this artist to thrive where he lives.

Ellis first visited the Tampa Bay area in 2002 as a guest poet at the University of Tampa and part of his introduction to the area included a trip to St.

SPMOP - PHOTO LAUREATE '23-'24

https://tsellis.com

Petersburg. He moved here in 2016 after meeting someone who lived here and now considers this his permanent home, although currently most of his work still takes place in other cities around the world. He is a successful and talented poet, photographer, and band leader. “The real deal,” one might say.

He comes with an impressive history. The fact alone that he has an MFA from Brown University and studied poetry at Harvard University with Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney makes me a bit intimidated. He worked for six years as an Assistant Professor of Writing at the esteemed Sarah Lawrence College and for nine at Case Western University. While working as a projectionist at the Harvard Film Archive, he assisted filmmaker Spike Lee and film historian Thomas Cripps and worked at the famous Grolier Poetry Bookshop.

A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry, he co-founded the Dark Room Collective and Reading Series, a Boston area organization that gave greater visibility to writers of color. His work has been featured in many journals including The Paris Review, The Nation, and Best American Poetry (1997, 2001, 2010, 2015), not to mention his own books of poetry including but not limited to Maverick

Room (Graywolf Press), The Genuine Negro Hero (The Kent State University Press), and Skin, Inc.: Identity Repair Poems (Graywolf Press).

In 2015, he co-founded Heroes Are Gang Leaders (HAGL) with saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, a literary Free Jazz band who were awarded the American Book Award for Oral Literature in 2018 and have performed all over the world and recorded a half dozen CDs.

His photographs have been exhibited at the Studiottantuno in Mantova Italy, at Howard University in Washington DC, and at the Leica Fotografie International Gallery, as well as others. He is the author of two photo books: “Mexico”, which features 88 of his photographs, and “Crank Shaped Notes,” which features 52 photographs, poetry and prose.

Ellis has an extraordinary ability to see and uncover aspects of the world around us that most of us overlook. He gives voice to the human condition in a delightfully organic and timeless way. His photographs are current while having an ageless feel. Sometimes it is difficult to date them, as though Ellis has somehow time traveled to the past and brought us all with him to witness the present through his artistic lens.

Once you meet him in person, you will not forget him. He has a stylish urban way of dressing and a keen inquisitive intellect. Yet, he has somehow been able to walk the streets of St. Pete for the last seven years without much of anyone taking notice. It probably does help that he spends much of the year working in other cities around the world, yet you can tell by the massive collection of photographs he has created of this area, he spends plenty of time seeing and watching the light and people that make this place distinctive. The quality of light is one of the things he says drew him to this area.

The fact that he has decided to participate in some area competitions and arts events should give us hope. Hope both for the longevity of Ellis staying in our area (which would be a very good thing) and for the possibility that other talented artists and creatives will also continue to figure out how to thrive here. This support is necessary if we are to continue to consider ourselves an arts destination.

Keep your eye out for the beautiful work of Thomas Sayers Ellis: poetry, spoken word, photography. He does it all very, very well. We should all look forward to seeing more. •