Author's Bio

t.p. Luce , a native of New Orleans and now Baltimore, is the author and photographer of thaBloc. He has been photographing in and around East Baltimore for the past eight years; he has been writing poetry and short short stories for ten.

He moved to Baltimore after graduating with a B.F.A. in photography from the Tisch School for the Arts at New York University. While there, he completed a photography project of a East Harlem family during their Christmas celebration. He had befriended the family while participating in the Little Brother/Big Brother program. It was his senior graduating project.

Wanting to continue this type of intimate portrayal, Luce had ideas of a more encompassing follow-on project that looked closer, challenged the conventional wisdom and asked the questions that mattered. Taking years to gestate, Luce began the slow process of capturing the daily and annual rhythms of a block of brick row homes, his neighborhood. As he began to capture these portraits, the stories and the poetry took form, and so did thaBloc, a celebration of the lives of thaBloc.

The celebrated peoples are his neighbors, friends, and fellow bloc patrons. Over the years his many roles in the community - as little league baseball coach, citizen soldier, small businessman, employer, employee, informal micro-loan officer, bloc information and transportation resource has allowed for unique access to stories often untold and misunderstood.

t. p. Luce is a father of two budding teenagers and lives in Baltimore, MD. This is his first published work of any kind