Recent work:

• Consulting Editor - Absent But Present: Voices from the Writer's Block. Detroit: Free School Press, 2020.
• Tompkins Poetry Award 2020 – 1st Place Recipient – selected by Camille Guthrie
• Hamtramck Free School poetry reading at Office Space Gallery (w/ Zan de Parry) - Jan 24, 2020
• Poems, Wayne Literary Review,  2019​
• “Boys Can Be Cat Ladies, Too” – The Wayne Literary Review, Spring 2018
• "Couplets 4 Bulleit" - Bitterzoet Magazine, 2017
• "Ars Poetica as a Part Time Writing Teacher", The Ibis Head Review, 2016
• "5:47 a.m.: the Town You Grew Up In" - Bitterzoet Magazine, 2015
• "Ode to Tinfoil" - Writing Without Walls, "The Food Issue", 2014www.scribd.com/document/465728661/DeGenaro-Tompkins-Poems
• "from the Phoenicians' First Dictionary" - ditch, magazine, 2013
• "Oranges" - Rusted Radishes, 2012
  

Tompkins Poetry Award - 2020 - 1st Place Manuscript

"Four Winds, A Fifth Song"

DeGenaro Tompkins Poems by Tony DeGenaro

This brilliant poet writes of fatherhood and sons, of grief and longing, of forests and highways, of gun violence in schools and struggle in the Rust Belt, of dark secrets and longing for a lost love, of racism and religion, of the joys of listening to music while driving and the injustices of racial profiling, of playing baseball with his son and of burying his beloveds. This precise poet uses the page as a “field of action,” like William Carlos Williams, and grips us with his inventive forms, propulsive meter, and infectious sounds. He knows that history is experienced bodily: “Rust / Belt like a memory fallen around your ankles.” He urges us to hear arias while walking in the woods: “Listen to these parents of men now speaking / among these giants of pulp and bark, I’ve / loved their boys for so long now, they / are not lost—just elsewhere—” He notices the eternal in the particular: “My son builds pyramid of Legos from living room floor / to attic.” A joy and an education to read, his bold poems break us open to the terrible truths of our times: 
​
“why is every life lost early a statistic but
not a study in war zones, occupied and endured at
the beginning of their journey, the first period of
                                    a hockey game, you might say.”

- remarks by Camille Guthrie, Final Judge, 2020.

Youth Arts Instruction:

I'm actively performing and publishing original poetry, and teaching creative writing for youth organizations around Metro Detroit.  I was the Writer-in-Residence at Westfield Preparatory High School & Communication & Media Arts High School for academic years 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 with InsideOut, teaching poetry and developing a manuscript for an anthology of work written by 9th - 12th graders.

Learn more about InsideOut & CityWide Poets here.

Take a look at some InsideOut At Home virtual lessons to the right, and check out some more here. 

InsideOut Literary Arts Blog

InsideOut Literary Arts At Home Lessons - All You Need is Love (Poems)
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