Shakespeare & Co. is pleased to host a reading by renowned Missoula poet David E. Thomas on Wednesday, May 15, at 7:00 pm. Thomas will read selections from his new poetry collection The Railroad Gravel: Selected Poems 1975-2022 (FootHills Publishing, 2024). This event is free and open to the public.

David E. Thomas grew up on the Hi-Line in North-central Montana. He graduated from the University of Montana then found himself on the streets of San Francisco where he began his literary education. Economic realities drove him to work on railroad gangs, big construction projects like Libby Dam and other labor intensive jobs. He has traveled in the United States, Mexico and Central America. He has published several books of poems, Fossil Fuel, Buck’s Last Wreck, The Hellgate Wind, Waterworks Hill, Old Power Company Road, The Gosling and Afternoon Stroll. He has poems in the anthologies The Last Best Place and Poems Across the Big Sky I and II and New Poets of the American West and has published poems in Romania, Blue Collar Review, Cedilla 6, 7 and 8 and many other small magazines. His essay “Gothic Days” appears in The Complete Montana Gothic edited by Peter Koch which also features Thomas’s earliest published work. He has published poems and an interview in Talking River, poems in San Pedro River Review and appears in the anthology Civilization in Crisis from FootHills Publishing. His most recent book is Railroad Gravel also from FootHills. He lives in Missoula, Montana.

David E. Thomas
Photography Credit: Kurt Wilson