When he was 12, Edward Thomas-Herrera started having visions.
It seems a little shocking to hear such serious musings from the normally mischievous Thomas-Herrera. These days he’s a performance poet with a quick, caustic tongue and a glamorously lowbrow persona, the spiritual love child of Dorothy Parker and Bette Midler. Despite his facility with language, he’s at a bit of a loss when it comes to explaining his prepubescent visions, though a strict Catholic upbringing by a devout Salvadoran mother surely primed the pump. Spending hours poring over The Lives of the Saints didn’t hurt either.
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After receiving an undergraduate degree in music from Rice University, he came to Chicago in 1989 to pursue an MFA in directing at DePaul. One year short of graduation he had to leave the program, but, Thomas-Herrera says, his time in school was not happy. He was “openly gay, and unrepentant about it. There were other gay students, but perhaps the sheer volume I put out made me a “difficult’ student.”
He may refer to himself these days as a “committed agnostic,” but a religious fervor–not to mention ecstasy–is everywhere apparent in his art, which is just as he would have it. “As I grow older I’m able to get more out of writing than I ever got out of my religion–or at least more comfort. There isn’t that threat of eternal damnation. Art is more user friendly.”
