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Tom Lynch
Last updated on Monday, December 23, 2002
Tom is an adjunct professor in the English Department at New Mexico State University teaching writing and Southwestern Literature. His primary scholarly interest is in the field of ecocriticism - the study of nature in literature - and he has published academic articles on Henry Thoreau, Ed Abbey, Leslie Silko, Gerald Vizenor, and others.
Tom Lynch Tom's numerous book reviews, primarily of books on Native Americans, nature writing, and Southwestern literature, have appeared in such publications as the San Francisco Chronicle, Western American Literature, ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment), Multicultural Review, and Desert Exposure. In addition to academic writing, Tom has published a number of creative non-fiction essays in places such as Weber Studies, Petroglyph, and Southern New Mexico Magazine.
Tom has both a scholarly and creative interest in haiku poetry and related forms of writing. Indeed his Ph.D. dissertation (U of Oregon, 1989) was on American haiku. His work regularly appears in haiku-related publications and he is the Southwest regional coordinator for the Haiku Society of America.
In both his scholarly and creative writing Tom focuses on the relationship between humans and the natural world. "The stories we tell about nature," he says, "influence how we treat it. In our efforts to restore health to the environments we inhabit, writing and storytelling will have a big role to play."
For the past few years Tom has been involved with the Border Book Festival in Las Cruces, and in 1999-2000 served as a writer-in-residence for the festival's Emerging Voices Program.
Tom Lynch resides in Las Cruces with his wife, Margaret Jacobs, their two sons, Cody and Riley, and Chloe, a border collie.
Articles by Tom Lynch
I'm awakened at 5 in the morning by the sound of gunfire.
No, it's not some gang bangers blasting away in the dark, nor even hunters harrying doves; it's something entirely different, my neighbors in nearby Tortugas pueblo beginning their dawn ceremony in honor of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
As we drive the dirt road, both boys in the back seat chant "ahhhhAHHHahhh" along with the bumps, their voices quavering in harmony with each tiny jolt. The simple pleasures of the backroads.
We arrive at the trailhead in Southern New Mexico's Organ Mountains, a few miles east of Las Cruces. "Mountain, mountain," Riley - 20 months in this world - points, practicing his new words. Before us the yucca-spiked, boulder-bounced bajada slopes up to a sheer, cringing plummet of cliff, skyward lunge of granite. But no, we aren't climbing up there, just staring, admiring.
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