In 1946, Thomas Lux was born in Northampton, Massachusetts. He was educated at Emerson College and The University of Iowa.

His books of poetry include God Particles: Poems (Houghton Mifflin, 2008); The Cradle Place (2004); The Street of Clocks (2001); New and Selected Poems, 1975-1995 (1997), which was a finalist for the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The Blind Swimmer: Selected Early Poems, 1970-1975 (1996); Split Horizon (1994), for which he received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Pecked to Death by Swans (1993); A Boat in the Forest (1992); The Drowned River: New Poems (1990); Half Promised Land (1986); Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy (1983); Massachusetts (1981); Like a Wide Anvil from the Moon the Light (1980); Sunday (1979); Madrigal on the Way Home (1977); The Glassblower's Breath (1976); Memory's Handgrenade (1972); and The Land Sighted (1970).

Thomas Lux also has edited The Sanity of Earth and Grass (1994, with Jane Cooper and Sylvia Winner) and has translated Versions of Campana (1977).

Lux has been the poet in residence at Emerson College (1972-1975), and a member of the Writing Faculty at Sarah Lawrence College and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. He has also taught at the Universities of Iowa, Michigan, and California at Irvine, among others. He has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry and has received three National Endowment for the Arts grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

He Currently teaches at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia.