A year-round book festival dedicated to great conversations with today's best writers.
Thomas Lynch
Thomas Lynch is an internationally-known writer and poet. He has authored five collections of poems and three books of essays.
Lynch’s work has been the subject of two film documentaries. PBS Frontline’s The Undertaking, aired nationwide in 2007, won the 2008 Emmy Award for Arts and Culture Documentary. The film, Learning Gravity, produced for the BBC and based on Lynch’s writings, was featured at the 2008 Telluride Film Festival and the 6th Traverse City Film Festival in 2009 where it was awarded the Michigan Prize by filmmaker Michael Moore.
Lynch’s essays, poems and stories have appeared in The Atlantic and Granta, The New York Times and Times of London, The New Yorker, Poetry and The Paris Review. His collection of essays, ”The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade,”won the Heartland Prize for non-fiction, the American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. It has been translated into seven languages. A second collection of essays, ”Bodies in Motion and at Rest,” won the Great Lakes Book Award.
Lynch is the recipient of grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Michigan Council for the Arts, the Michigan Library Association, then Writers Voice Project, the National Book Foundation, and the Arts Council of Ireland. He has read and lectured at universities and literary centers throughout Europe, theUnited Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and theUnited States. Lynch is also a regular presenter to professional conferences of funeral directors, hospice and medical ethics professionals, clergy, educators, and business leaders. He is an Adjunct Professor in the graduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan.
Lynch has appeared on C-Span, MSNBC, The Today Show, and the PBS Bill Moyers Series, On Our Own Terms.
After graduating from college and mortuary school, he took over his father’s funeral home in Milford, Michigan in 1974, a job he has held ever since.
1970 Lynch went to Ireland for the first time, to find his family, and read William Butler Yeats and James Joyce, an experience he recounts in his book,“Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans.” He has returned many times since then, and now owns the small cottage in West Clare that was the home of his great-great-grandfather, and which was given as a wedding gift in the 19th century. He spends a portion of each year there.
Lynch appeared with the National Writers Series in the Spring of 2010. He was interviewed by nationally-known author, Jerry Dennis.
Thomas Lynch in Chicago Tribune: Read Here.
