About | Press Kit | Online
Brief Bio
Sprouted from a family of educators, Samantha Thornhill is an international poet. She travels the globe performing her poetry to audiences of all stripes and walks of life, regularly performing at universities, schools, and festival stages from Budapest to Brooklyn—the borough where she resides.
Writing since age 8, Samantha went on to receive her Bachelors in creative writing from Florida State University, where she joined BackTalk! Poetry Troupe, a guild that nurtured Samantha into the performer 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 (MFA) in poetry.
Samantha has since built a life for herself in New York City, where for the past six years she has been teaching poetry to actors-in-training at the Juilliard School. Regularly, she is contracted to teach creative writing workshops to senior citizens for Poets & Writers. She also serves as writer in residence at the Bronx Academy of Letters where she teaches creative writing seminars and manages a talented group of teens in producing their school newspaper.
Samantha also educates youth through her writing. In 2007, Simon & Schuster published her middle grade chapter book, Everybody Hates School Presentations, based on the hit show Everybody Hates Chris. In 2010, her ode about the late folk legend Odetta was published by Scholastic in the form of a picture book, which received starred reviews in School Library Journal, Publisher’s Weekly, and Booklist.
Her individual poems have been featured in the following publications: Crab Orchard Review, Indiana Review, Poets and Artists Magazine, Cimarron Review, 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, Soul Mountain, Hedgebrook, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the Jerome Foundation, which enabled her to spend three months in her homeland, Trinidad & Tobago to work on her young adult novel, Seventeen Seasons, forthcoming from Penguin/Putnam.
Props
"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."
Andrea Davis Pinkey, Vice President Scholastic
"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."
Dr. Kwame Dawes, Emmy award winning poet & director of Calabash Literary Festival
"Samantha Thornhill brought Caribbean sunshine to her performance workshop at the JMU Furious Flower Poetry Center as she had our students use the essence of colors to stretch the boundaries of their poetic language. Her own performance was not only model but magic."
Dr. Joanne Gabbin, Editor, Executive Director
"Samantha Thornhill is a wordsmith of the highest caliber. Powerful and playful, wise and wicked, laced with unforgettable images and deeply original ideas, her poems are theme music to the kind of world I want to live in."
Adam Mansbach, winner of the California Book Award for The End of the Jews
"Samantha Thornhill's work is joyfully ambitious, the way she summons sense and memory to re-illuminate voices and events from both geographic and psychic spaces -- all in a language meant to reach a wide range of audiences across many borders."
Patrick Rosal, author of My American Kundiman
"Ms. Thornhill is a resilient teacher who has helped me learn about my love for writing, that writing is a blessing. She has also awed me with her amazing poetry."
Sayeeda Copeland, 16, Writer
"Sassy with the quill, and brimming with stories - and should you be so lucky, dig on the spillage."
Deja K. Taylor, from HBO’S Brave New Voices
"Samantha is among the most talented writers and literary performers I've encountered in my 30 years in publishing. She works in many genres--poetry, fiction, children’s young adult. But 30 years old, she is a writer to watch!"
Adrienne Ingrum, Literary Agent