Poet Thomas Lux passed away on February 5, 2017. The cause was cancer.

Lux was the author of nineteen books of poetry, the most recent of which, To the Left of Time, was published in 2016.

He won the Kingsley Tufts Award in 1995 for his collection Split Horizon. He was awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts three times throughout his career, as well as a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. His New and Selected Poems, 1975–1995 was a finalist for the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

Lux taught at many institutions: Emerson College, Sarah Lawrence College, the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, and the Universities of Iowa, Michigan, and California at Irvine.

At the time of his passing, Lux was Bourne Professor of Poetry and director of the McEver Visiting Chairs program at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The Academy of American Poets cites Stanley Kunitz’s comment about Lux: “[He is] sui generis, his own kind of poet, unlike any of the fashions of his time.”

Lux told Elizabeth Mehren in the Los Angeles Times, “This is not something one chooses to do.… It is something I was drawn to. I do it because I love to do it, and because I don't have any choice. If I don't write, I feel empty and lost.” He added, “Poetry exists because there is no other way to say the things that get said in good poems except in poems. There is something about the right combination of metaphor or image connected to the business of being alive that only poems can do. To me, it makes me feel more alive, reading good poetry.”

Read some of Lux’s work at the Poetry Foundation.