Gail Thomas has published six books, most recently Leaving Paradise. Her poems have been widely published in journals and anthologies. Among her awards are the A.V Christie award from Seven Kitchens Press for Trail of Roots, the Charlotte Mew Prize from Headmistress Press for Odd Mercy, the Narrative Poetry Prize from Naugatuck River Review, the Massachusetts Center for the Book's "Must Read" for Waving Back, and the Quartet Journal's Editor's Choice Prize. She has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and Ucross, and several poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She teaches poetry with Pioneer Valley Writers' Workshops, visits schools and libraries with her therapy dog, and works with immigrant and refugee communities in Western Massachusetts.

Books by Gail Thomas:

Other poems on the web by Gail Thomas:
Three poems
"Forgiveness, I am still working on it"
"The Revenant"
"Marriage at 63"
"Panacea"
Four poems
Three poems
Four poems Gail Thomas's Website.

About Leaving Paradise:

"Gail Thomas in her powerful book, Leaving Paradise, declaims in the title poem, 'I chose wilderness' and readers will be thankful that she did. There is a wrenching grief in many of these poems, but the countervailing and stronger direction is always towards tenderness, always towards joy and affection for the natural world. We are taken with Thomas's bravery as she ventures forth on 'the future trails ahead/ on stony ground.' 'Tangled roots course/ like bruised veins at every angle and still 'the earth of sweet surprise offers...jewels/ hewn after rough stones are pressed.' In cento and rhyme, in golden shovel and erasure, in ghazal and ode, Gail Thomas performs magic in recreating the taste and struggle, both bitter and sweet, of a life. This is writing that matters!"
—Howard Faerstein

"Leaving Paradise is about the spaces between, about being in two places at once: on the beach between high and low tides; being swallowed into the belly of a whale and spit back out again, 'still breathing.' For Gail Thomas, and she speaks for us all, ripe life sits beside life's passing, and the parts of life we must shed to move forward. Almost always her poems are rooted in the natural world, which mirrors our own cycles and astonishments. Like the hiker stretching over a storm-felled tree to continue on a path, or salamanders making an improbable road crossing to survive, these poems straddle, find balance, and move beyond the known into the beautiful unknown."
—Rebecca Hart Olander