 About | Press Kit | Online Brief Bio Sprouted from a family of educators, Samantha Thornhill travels the globe performing her poetry to audiences of all stripes and walks of life. She regularly performs at universities, schools, and festival stages from South Africa to Brooklyn, the borough in which she resides. Writing since age 8, Samantha went on to receive her bachelors degree in creative writing from Florida State University, where she joined BackTalk! Poetry Troupe, a guild that nurtured Samantha into the performance poet she is today. Upon graduation at FSU, Samantha received a full fellowship from the University of Virginia where she received her masters of fine arts in poetry while coaching Virginia's slam team to two consecutive regional victories. Samantha has since built a life for herself in New York City, where she teaches poetry to actors at the Juilliard School. She also serves grades 6-12 as writer in residence at the Bronx Academy of Letters. There, she teaches creative writing seminars and manages a talented group of teens in producing of The Raven, the school newspaper. Along with using her gift of teaching to inspire the younger generation of writers, Samantha also educates youth through her writing. In 2007, she and published a middle grade chapter book, Everybody Hates School Presentations, based on the hit show Everybody Hates Chris. When Samantha is not writing poems--mainly odes--she is at work on her young adult novel Seventeen Seasons, to be published by Penguin Putnam. In November “Ode to Little Odetta,” her performance poem about the late folk legend, will be published by Scholastic Press as a picture book. Her individual poems have been featured in the following publications: Crab Orchard Review, Indiana Review, Poets and Artists Magazine, The Louisville Review, Two Review, African American Review and Faultline. Samantha is grateful to the organizations that have been most instrumental in nurturing her artistic and spiritual growth: Cave Canem Retreat, Soul Mountain Retreat, Hedgebrook Retreat, and most recently the Jerome Foundation, which enabled her to spend three months in her homeland, Trinidad & Tobago. |
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"Samantha Thornhill is one of those brilliant young poets whose writing talent is a rare mix grit, soul, and music. She inspires the poet in each of us and gives the heart a place to enjoy the power of words." "What Samantha does with language, with idiom, with sound, with metaphor and with form--strikes me as groundbreaking. It is the wrong word. The word I want should sound like opening a new space in our literature."
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