Piri Thomas

 

Poet, Writer,
A Voice for Unity

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Author of:

Down These Mean Streets
Savior, Savior Hold My Hand
Seven Long Times
Stories from E1 Barrio

Born Juan Pedro Tomás, of Puerto Rican and Cuban parents in New York City's Spanish Harlem in 1928, Piri Thomas began his struggle for survival, identity, and recognition at an early age. The vicious street environment of poverty, racism, and street crime took its toll and he served seven years of nightmarish incarceration at hard labor. But, with the knowledge that he had not been born a criminal, he rose above his violent background of drugs and gang warfare, and he vowed to use his street and prison know-how to reach hard core youth and turn them away from a life of crime.

In 1967, with a grant from the Rabinowitz Foundation, both his career and fame as an author were launched with the electrifying autobiography, Down These Mean Streets. After more than 25 years of being constantly in print, it is now considered a classic.

In Down These Mean Streets, Piri Thomas made El Barrio (the neighborhood) a household word to multitudes of non-Spanish-speaking readers. A front-page review in the New York Times book review section May 21, 1967 proclaimed: "It claims our attention and emotional response because of the honesty and pain of a life led in outlaw, fringe status, where the dream is always to escape."

Savior, Savior Hold My Hand also received wide critical acclaim, as did Seven Long Times, a chronicle of one man's experience in New York's dehumanizing penal system. Stories from El Barrio, a collection of short stories, is for young people of all ages.

Piri's extensive travel in Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico, Europe, and the United States has also been perceptively documented in free-lance articles by him. His eye-opening experiences have contributed to a unique globalist perspective on peace and justice so necessary in these days of international problems and conflicts.

Piri currently resides in El Cerrito, California, with his wife Suzanne Dod Thomas. He is working on a book entitled A Matter of Dignity (the sequel to Down These Mean Streets) and distributing his poetry with music, Sounds Of The Streets and No Mo' Barrio Blues. He continues to speak at universities and schools and in the community throughout the United States.

Piri's Program

Ever since the publication of Down These Mean Streets, Piri has been talking to people, young and old, about his struggle for survival and identity and the effects of racism upon our children and upon himself as a Latino and a person of color. His fundamental message, Unity Among Us, draws from the spiritual and cultural realms to articulate the roots of our dignity as human beings, part of an earth and a universe. To convey this message, which is adaptable to many settings, Piri utilizes dramatic readings of both published and unpublished prose and poetry, authored by him or other writers, to provide a veritable concert of the spoken word. Sometimes, he utilizes music to accompany his message. He wants you to have a comprehension of an outside world as well as inner ones. With his stage magnetism he always creates a popular, unifying, and uplifting experience in which he delights his audiences while conveying his attractive underlying message of unity, positive self-affirmation, peace, and social justice.

In addition, Piri offers informative insights into the Puerto Rican literary and historical experience from a New York perspective. His special workshops on creative writing, "Creations Without Hesitations," urge participants to seek a literary outlet for their personal experiences, as he emphasizes a topic close to his heart: "The worst prison is the prison of the mind," a philosophy which guides his own life.

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