San Diego Reader

Thomas Larson is the author of The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” and The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative. He holds workshops on memoir writing and delivers multimedia presentations on music, the craft of writing, and the "social author" in the digital age throughout the United States. Larson writes personal essays, memoir, book reviews, and literary and music criticism for many publications, among them Gettysburg Review, Antioch Review, New Letters, Fourth Genre, and Free Inquiry. He regularly contributes book reviews to Contrary Magazine and The Rumpus. In the early 1980s, he was the music critic for the Santa Fe New Mexican. After getting an undergraduate degree in music composition, he moved to San Diego in 1982 and earned a master's in American literature from UCSD. During the 1990s, he was a professor of English at San Diego City College. Since 1999, he has been a staff writer for the Reader, where he specializes in reportage and narrative cover stories. He teaches in the low-residency MFA Program in Creative Nonfiction at Ashland University, Ashland, Ohio. Larson lives in Clairemont with his partner Suzanna. His website is thomaslarson.com.