The Bathers

In 1973, Thomas moved to Houston as writer-in-residence at Texas Southern University. At Texas Southern, he helped edit the journal Roots. Beginning in 1984 and for more than two decades as a professor of English at the University of Houston–Downtown. From 1973 to 1979 he served as Writer in Residence at Texas Southern University, Florida A & M University; the State of Arkansas; and the state of Oklahoma. Thomas also made important contributions to the study of African-American literature.[6] In 2000, he published Extraordinary Afrocentric Modernism and 20th-Century American Poetry, his overview of the work of James Fenton and Amiri Baraka, among others.[1]