Thomas E. Weatherly Jr.

Weatherly was buried in a traditional Jewish ceremony in Huntsville, Alabama, upon his death in July 2014.

His work career also includes serving as a teacher of creative writing at St. Mark's Church in New York City, beginning in 1972. He served as poet-in-residence at Bishop College in Dallas, Texas, during 1970 and 1971. He was a writer-in-residence at State University of New York-Buffalo in the seventies. He taught Afro-Hispanic art at Rutgers University-Newark and conducted poetry workshops at grade schools, universities, prisons and poetry projects. He was an avid bicyclist, computer enthusiast and music lover. In later years, he split his time between New York City and Huntsville, Alabama. His blogs, Eclectic Git and saint satin stain, discuss topics ranging from prosody and politics; the last entry of saint satin stain is poem Weatherly wrote as a memorial for Walter Dean Myers, who had died just days before Weatherly himself. He also wrote for Left in Alabama, a political community blog.

In 1971, he published Thumbprint, and in 2006, Groundwater Press published his noted short history of the saxophone. Weatherly also edited and co-edited several anthologies, including Natural Process (1970), New Black Voices (1972), The Poetry of Black America (1973), Uplate (1989), Everybody Goodbye Ain't Gone (2006), and The Second Set (2008).

Weatherly served in the U.S. Marines before moving to New York in the winter of 1966–1967. Although sometimes classed among New York's Umbra poets, a circle of African-American poets and writers founded in the early 1960s, he did not include himself among them, having arrived late on the scene. He attended the inaugural poetry workshops at the Poetry Project, taught by poet Joel Oppenheimer, and soon began to teach there himself. Publishing in small journals such as Gandhabba, Minetta Review, Whetstone, The World, and Exquisite Corpse, Weatherly began describing himself as a poet; his first book, Maumau American Cantos, appeared in 1970.

Thomas Weatherly Jr. (November 3, 1942 – July 2014) was an American poet, associated with the Saint Mark's Church Poetry Project in New York City.

Born in Scottsboro, Alabama, on November 3, 1942, Thomas Weatherly Jr./eliyahu ben Avraham was an American poet connected with the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York City. Weatherly’s parents, Thomas E. Weatherly Sr. and Lucy B. Golson Weatherly, were educators and civic leaders in the African-American community. His grandmother, Mary E. Hunter, was the first black school principal in the county.