Tom Andrews

Tom Andrews was an American poet and critic from Charleston, West Virginia. His poetry collections include The Hemophiliac’s Motorcycle (University of Iowa Press, 1994) and TheBrother’s Country (Persea Books, 1990). He also wrote a memoir titled Codeine Diary: A Memoir (Little, Brown, 1998) and criticism, such as The Point Where All Things Meet: Essays on Charles Wright (Oberlin College Press, 1995) and On William Stafford: The Worth of Local Things (University of Michigan, 1993). 

Andrews won a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2000 Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy in Rome, the1993 Iowa Poetry Prize for The Hemophiliac’s Motorcycle, and a National Poetry Series Award for TheBrother’s Country in 1989.

Random Symmetries: The Collected Poems of Tom Andrews (Oberlin College Press, 2002) was published posthumously. In the forward, Charles Wright wrote of Andrews: “The leaves just burst from his fingers. He had that odd stance to the world and its language that made whatever he wrote seem new and undiscovered, like treasure hauled up into the sealight from the ocean floor.”

Andrews graduated from Hope College in 1984 after spending the second semester of his senior year as an intern for FIELD magazine. In 1987, he graduated from the University of Virginia with an MFA in creative writing. He worked as a copyeditor for Mathematical Reviews, a bibliographic journal for mathematicians, physicists, statisticians, logicians, historians, and philosophers of mathematics. 

He died at the age of forty from thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura, a rare blood disorder.