BIO

Thomas C. Spear is a scholar, translator and writer. His novel, Les mascarades du Wisconsin (Éditions Hamac, 2023), set in the American Heartland, revisits the baby boom years and social imperatives that define masculinity through a father-son narrative, challenging myths of wholesome prosperity and predetermined destinies. 

Professor of French Emeritus at the City University of New York (Lehman College and The Graduate Center, CUNY), Spear taught courses in autobiography and Francophone literature, particularly from Haiti and Québec. He co-edited anthologies on Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Marie-Célie Agnant, edited a volume of first-person essays, La culture française vue d'ici et d'ailleurs, and two collections of fiction by contemporary Haitian writers. A pioneer of the Francophone Internet, he founded and edited Île en île (1998-2021), an extensive archive featuring authors from French-speaking islands and their diasporas. For his promotion of Francophone literature and cultures, he has received honors in France, Haiti and Québec. 

Translator (and co-translator) of texts by Leslie Kaplan and Édouard Glissant, he writes in both French and English. In French, his work includes short récits and a forthcoming sidafiction (an AIDS memoir set in the 1980s). He is editing an oral history of Viennese refugee Katharine Bergmann (1908-1991) and is completing research for an illustrated tale of immigration to Boston. 

From Wisconsin, he spent several years on the West Coast before settling in New York City, where he has lived since 1983.