Lee Colin Thomas is the author of Honey in the Dark, which won the 2020 Brighthorse Prize for poetry. Honey in the Dark was published by Brighthorse Books in fall 2021. Poems in the collection were first published in journals such as Poet Lore, Narrative Magazine, Salamander, Water~Stone Review, and elsewhere. Professionally, Lee teaches technical communication and information design at the University of Minnesota. Personally, he aspires to enjoy martinis with Judy Woodruff of the PBS Newshour.

tl;dr Background

Lee grew up in Northfield, Minnesota, where his extended family owned a small grocery store for 40+ years. Parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins all worked at the store at some point, as did Lee while in high school. After graduating, he moved to Portland, Oregon, to attend Lewis & Clark College. While enrolled there, he spent a year in Munich, Germany, and attended classes at the University of Munich. Later, he earned a master’s degree in scientific and technical communication from the University of Minnesota. A resident of Minneapolis since 2001, Lee currently works as a communications consultant and instructor at the University of Minnesota; he teaches students in the Department of Writing Studies and in the MS in Business Analytics program at the Carlson School of Management.

Like most writers, Lee has loved stories and books since childhood. His parents read to him from a young age, and his mother Jean can still recite whole passages from Where is the Keeper by Mabel Watts—Lee’s nap-time favorite at age five. The story about a zookeeper and the animals he looks after is told in rhyme: Where is the keeper who lives at the zoo? The wolf wants to know and the kangaroo too.

Early Work

In the seventh grade, Lee and his friend Thadra passed poems—handwritten on Mead notebook paper—back and forth during social studies class. Lee can’t recall much schooling in poetry beyond having to memorize Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky at one point, but his interest in creative writing endured. In high school and college, he took several writing classes and completed an independent study project in short fiction during his final year at Lewis & Clark.

Serendipity

Lee rediscovered poetry in the early 2000’s. While browsing in a bookstore, he picked up an anthology that included classic poems by James Wright, Mary Oliver, May Sarton, Hayden Carruth, and many others. Reading these poems prompted him to enroll in classes at The Loft Literary Center. At the same time, he was lucky to have a close friend in the poet Merie Kirby, who entertained all his questions about reading and writing poems. She also invited him to join a multi-genre writing group.

In the years that followed, Lee took classes from poets such as Melanie Figg, Jude Nutter, and Deborah Keenan. In 2010 he received a Loft Mentor Series Award, which included a year-long fellowship to study with multiple writers, including Kristin Naca, E. Ethelbert Miller, and Jonis Agee. He began publishing poems shortly after, in journals and magazines such as Poet Lore, Salamander, The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, Water~Stone Review, and elsewhere. And he continued to participate in various writing groups and workshops.

The Almost Book

In 2015, Lee’s poetry manuscript, The Next Strange Place, was a finalist  for the Trio House Press Trio Award, the Jacar Press Book Award, and the Unicorn Press First Book Award. Individual poems were named as finalists for the Narrative Magazine annual poetry contest in 2015 and 2019. Additional publication credits include Midwestern Gothic, Nassau Review, Tampa Review, Tinderbox Poetry Review, Nimrod International Journal, and elsewhere.

Honey in the Dark

Lee’s poetry collection, Honey in the Dark, won the 2020 Brighthorse Prize and is forthcoming from Brighthorse Books in 2021. Many of the poems in this collection are about imagining life from different perspectives. As humans, we experience life as linear, with each choice we make closing off other possibilities as time marches forward. But even the happiest among us sometimes ponder the lives we might have lived, if only out of curiosity. What if we had made different choices, not due to regret, but simply out of the desire to experience more … of everything? What if time travel, multiplicity, technology, or magic made it possible to live more fully in this world? What might we encounter while living as a different gender, in a different body all together, or in the “finer folds and pockets” of nature?

Honey in the Dark honors the human experience while simultaneously inviting readers to imagine “the next strange place” we might find ourselves. The speaker in these poems travels his own timeline—from a vanished childhood to an unknown future—while also considering non-human existences: Life as an insect, as the color yellow, as language, and as the night watchman for the planet. The reality of grief and death are acknowledged, but any concession is conditional, even hopeful, suggesting that whatever awaits us next might be astonishing and beautiful—as this life often is. “After the dumb luck to have tripped / on the threshold of this planet // who’s to say?” he writes, reminding readers, “that this — this / is wonderful. Look now. This is all // about to change.”