Truth Thomas, Howard County’s inaugural poet laureate, is striving to ‘bring people together’

To Truth Thomas, poetry is a way of documenting life — as is music, as is photography.

“That’s what … art does. At its best, it reports on all of the ugliness and all of the beauty that life is,” he said.“I’ve always wanted to try to bring people together in the work that I do, so that the generations that follow will have a better life than, hopefully, the ones that we live now.”

Thomas, who lives in Columbia, is the founder of Cherry Castle Publishing; won the 2013 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Poetry; and has been published in more than 150 publications, in addition to his own collections.

As of April, he’s also Howard County’s inaugural poet laureate, the first face of a new program initiated to spread and uplift the art form.

The launch of the honorary two-year role, introduced by Howard County Executive Calvin Ball in partnership with the Howard County Arts Council and the Howard County Poetry & Literature Society, means that Thomas will become a familiar face — and voice — as he reads his poetry at county events.

His appointment coincides with the poetry society’s 50-year anniversary, and he’ll soon be joined by a youth poet laureate.

“Words connect. Words can help heal,” Ball said. “Especially in these perilous times, people want to be connected. They want to be inspired. They want to have their hopes, dreams, aspirations, their pain, their passions to be heard and conveyed in ways that a poet laureate can help communicate and articulate.”

Howard County government’s funding for the position — which comes with a stipend of $5,000 per year — was proposed in Ball’s Fiscal Year 2025 operating budget and approved by the County Council, his office said. It comes in the form of a grant to the Howard County Arts Council.

“This is the first time, and whenever you do something for the first time you’re breaking ground and you’re blazing trails,” Ball said, adding that he hopes the program will continue beyond  Thomas’ term.

Poet laureate programs already exist in the surrounding Prince George’s and Montgomery counties.

Tara Hart, co-chair of Howard County Poetry & Literature Society, said talk of establishing the current poet laureate program “opened up” last summer when it was announced that three Columbia streets would be named in honor of former resident and late poet Lucille Clifton, who had served as Maryland’s poet laureate and as a longtime artistic director of the literary group.

“Having a formal role in the celebration of poetry is something that aligns very closely with our mission of enlarging the audience for the appreciation of contemporary literature. And we believe that poetry is for everybody,” Hart said.

She added that the poet laureate will be “infusing” poetry into everyday spaces where it might not be so expected.

“I personally hope it will elevate poetry in the consciousness of Howard County residents,” said Coleen West, the executive director of the Howard County Arts Council.

People are often exposed to poetry in school and at open mic events, but those aren’t the only avenues, said Sylvia Jones, the associate poetry editor at Black Lawrence Press and an adjunct creative writing lecturer at Goucher College and George Washington University.

Earlier this year, she served on a review panel alongside Maryland’s 10th poet laureate Grace Cavalieri and literary activist and author E. Ethelbert Miller to make a recommendation to Ball’s office regarding who would become the Howard County poet laureate — a task she said was made more “strenuous” by the fact that it would be the county’s first.

“I could see a definitive map of growth in his work on the page,” she said of Thomas.

Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, Thomas grew up in Maryland just outside of Washington, D.C., and studied political science at Howard University. He recalled spending part of his time at what was then the African American Resource Center, directed by Miller.

Thomas didn’t graduate, instead heading to Los Angeles in the early 80s to pursue a career in music as a singer-songwriter. There, he was signed to Capitol Records and released an album called “Take Love” while still using his birth name, Glenn Edward Thomas.

He started performing at slam poetry events in D.C. after being inspired by the 1998 movie “Slam.”

“That was the first time that I had seen people express themselves passionately without music, and move people,” he said of the film.

After returning to Howard University for workshops led by author and poet Tony Medina, Thomas got an MFA in poetry at New England College. He joined the Howard County Poetry & Literature Society, where he was formerly a writer-in-residence and a member of the advisory group.

“D.C. shaped me as an artist. Howard shaped me very much,” he said.

Recently, he’s taken to photographing and writing about the different neighborhoods of D.C. — “going to every part of it, the roughest parts and the most genteel, to write about the dichotomy that exists,” he said.

In Howard County, he does much of his writing at Savage Mill and Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Church.

As poet laureate, he’s interested in launching a series of writing workshops, where he’ll teach forms of verse including his own, called “Skinny” poetry, which he said consists of 11 lines and has its own set of rules.

“I just want people to write whatever is on their hearts,” he said. “Although it’s true Howard County has pockets of great diversity … we’re in America, and we have challenges, like every other part of America.”

Hart described Truth’s poetry as facing head-on “the ways in which we are divided.” West said he is “soft spoken, but he has really great power in his words.”

Thomas’ work “speaks to the times, not just the county,” Miller said.

In a poem titled “On Holy War,” Thomas writes: “… A headless boy stops and asks me / if he’s Israeli or a Palestinian’s son, and which / of the bullets that struck him, was the holy one.”

Various organizations have requested Thomas’s presence at their events, Hart said. At Books in Bloom, a Columbia literary event that included readings from Thomas and others, he recalled a young attendee who said poetry was “cool.”

Howard County’s new youth poet laureate position, planned as a one-year term with a $500 honorarium, will begin in August and will give the poet an opportunity to “be a voice of a generation that is too often unheard,” Ball said.

Thomas, with the bulk of his tenure still ahead of him, is part of a blossoming poetry network in Howard County.

Speaking about being the first, he referenced a line by the late poet and author Maya Angelou when he said “Nobody makes it all alone.”