Thomas Kneeland

Thomas Kneeland is an award-winning poet, educator, speaker, humanitarian, and visual artist. He is the author of We Be Walkin’ Blackly in the Deep (Marian University), and a 2022 Frontier Poetry Global Poetry Prize finalist, representing the continent of Africa. His poetry is widely published in the United States in journals and archives such as Up the Staircase Quarterly, South Florida Poetry Journal, INverse Poetry Archives, Clepsydra Literary & Art Magazine, Rigorous Magazine, and High Shelf Press.

His work has been commissioned for a number of organizations, including the Indiana Arts Commission, the Indiana State Library, the University of Indianapolis College of Applied Behavioral Sciences, and Black Lives Matter.

He founded The Elevation Review, an international poetry journal that amplifies the voices of underrepresented writers, with a strong emphasis on those writers whose cultures and communities combat the looming clouds of marginalization and oppression.

Kneeland holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from DePauw University, an M.A. in Ministry — with a specialization in Worship Art — from Wesley Seminary at Indiana Wesleyan University, and is a thesis candidate in Butler University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, where he studies poetry.