Dan Thomas-Glass: Poet, Educator, and Author of Daughters of Your Century

Dan Thomas-Glass is a San Francisco poet, educator, critic, and editor whose books include Daughters of Your Century, The Great American Beatjack Volume I, Kate & Sonia (in the months before our second daughter’s birth), and 880.

Thomas-Glass belongs among contemporary poets whose writing brings family, labor, popular culture, politics, music, Jewish practice, and experimental form into the same field. His work often treats poetic structure as a way of thinking about collective life.

Daughters of Your Century

Daughters of Your Century, published by Furniture Press Books in 2014, brings fatherhood and ethical attention into conversation with contemporary social life. The poems move through family experience while remaining alert to work, history, gender, politics, and the public world surrounding intimate relationships.

The collection reflects a recurring concern in Thomas-Glass’s writing: private life is always shaped by larger structures, and poetry can examine the points where those structures become visible inside everyday experience.

The Great American Beatjack Volume I

The Great American Beatjack Volume I uses the prosody of existing poems and songs as a formal structure for new writing. The project treats rhythm as an inherited system that can be inhabited, redirected, and made to carry different cultural materials.

This practice connects poetry with music while also reflecting Thomas-Glass’s critical interest in the relation between Language writing, hip hop, urban politics, and collective forms of expression.

Language poetry and hip hop

Thomas-Glass wrote doctoral work on Language poetry and rap music, examining how poetic form can register histories of urban politics, cultural production, and collective desire. His critical interests give additional context to a poetry attentive to rhythm, social structure, and the circulation of public language.

Readers interested in this literary lineage can continue through Language poetry and experimental poetry.

Family and labor

Family life is central to Thomas-Glass’s poetry. Parenting, marriage, work, commuting, teaching, and the material organization of daily life become subjects through which larger ethical and political questions can be approached.

His writing frequently joins tenderness with analysis. Domestic scenes remain specific while opening toward questions of labor, education, economic systems, social movements, and responsibility.

With + Stand

From 2008 to 2011 Thomas-Glass edited and published With + Stand, a journal devoted to systems-oriented poetry and poetics. The project formed part of a Bay Area small-press culture in which editing, criticism, publication, teaching, and poetry often overlapped.

Jewish life and ritual

Thomas-Glass has described Jewish tradition and practice as important sources for his understanding of ceremony, ritual, ancestry, and poetic invocation. His writing has engaged Jewish texts directly at times and more broadly reflects the perspective of a practicing Jewish parent and educator.

Education and teaching

Thomas-Glass studied English at the University of California, Berkeley, and earned a doctorate at the University of California, Davis. He has worked extensively in education and currently leads The Brandeis School of San Francisco.

His literary and educational work share an interest in how language forms communities and how inherited structures can be examined, taught, revised, and carried forward.