Background photo: Frank Thomas
Manipulation and design layout: Elizabeth Stark

Gary Thomas grew up on a peach farm outside Empire, California, and still remembers how to drive a Caterpillar tractor.  Prior to retirement, he taught eighth grade language arts for thirty-one years, and junior college English for seven—sharing, reading aloud, and discussing at least one poem every day with his students.  Over the years he’s presented poetry workshops for a number of statewide organizations, festivals, and conferences. He has had poems published in California English,In the Grove, Time of Singing, The Comstock Review, and in the anthology More Than Soil, More Than Sky:  The Modesto Poets.  He will have his poems included in the anthology The Biggest Valley: Poems from California’s Heartland, forthcoming in Winter 2016.  He is the vice president of the Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center, an actor in community theater, a fair-to-middlin’ gardener…