Born Thomas Dawson on August 23, 1949 to Norman and Marilyn (King) Dawson, in Chicago, Ill., Dawson realized he wanted to be a poet at age 9. He moved with his family to North Carolina, Georgia and Pennsylvania. Dawson graduated from Furman University in 1972 with a major in anthropology. During the 1970s, he lived abroad in France, and then returned to the U.S. to become editor of Beatitude magazine in San Francisco, becoming one of the “Baby Beats,” and where he was co-founder and Director of the San Francisco International Poetry Festival.

Dawson changed his name to Thomas Rain Crowe in 1979. In the 1980s, after returning to his boyhood home in North Carolina, he was a founding editor of Katuah Journal: A Bioregional Journal of the Southern Appalachians and founded New Native Press. From 1979 to 1982, Crowe lived in the woods of western North Carolina and based his memoir, Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods, on this experience. In 1994, Crowe founded Fern Hill Records, a recording label devoted exclusively to the collaboration of poetry and music.

Crowe is an internationally known poet, translator, editor, publisher, anthologist and recording artist and author of thirty books of original and translated works.