Stephen Paul Thomas was born, youngest of six children, to a working class family in Auburn, Washington, a rail center in the then agricultural Green River Valley south of Seattle. He began writing poems as boy, after hearing recordings of Julie Harris reading Emily Dickinson and of Robert Frost reading his own work. At fourteen he left home to study for the priesthood at the seminary of the archdiocese of Seattle, where he came under the influence of Fr. Melvin Farrell, who had studied under Theodore Roethke at the University of Washington. He intellectual interests led him away from the priesthood, first to Marquette University, where he took a degree in English Literature, and then to Cornell University, where he was a graduate fellow in the Medieval Literature. It was here that he first came in contact with A.R. Ammons, whose free improvisations in a purely American idiom helped to free him from the essentially European prosodic constraints of Frost and Hopkins, his early models.
Disgusted with the political aspects of advanced academics, he left Cornell without a degree in 1975, and did not return to the academy until 1988, when he enrolled in the University of Washington and completed his MA under the tutelage of Charlie Altieri and Hazzard Adams. Meantime, he developed his poetic gifts in the public venues of Portland and Seattle, where he became associated with Red Sky Poetry Theater, founded in 1981 by Don Wilsun, Joseph Keppler, Judith Roche and others. At this time he developed also into a performer of poems, his own and others', and founded The Cabaret Hegel, a performance club in Seattle's industrial flats, where he not only performed, but also presented the works of such writers and performers as Charlie Burks, Jesse Bernstein, Bill Shively, Jesse Minkert and Amy Denio. The Cabaret Hegel survived as a performance venue for two years in the mid 80's, until the building that housed it was leveled to make way for off- and on-ramps to Interstate 5. In 1982, at Seattle's Bumbershoot Festival, he met Charles Potts, who subsequently championed his work and published his first, and so far only, full length collection, Journeyman (1997). Their friendship and association led to Thomas' appearance at many Walla Walla Poetry Parties and to his working as a contributing editor of The Temple, where some of his finest poems made their first appearance. Thomas also served as poetry editor of Seattle's Point No Point, founded by Walt and Marie Crowley and Patrick McRoberts, and funded by the Blue Moon Tavern, one of Theodore Roethke's and other poets' watering holes, in Seattle's University District.
Although he writes frequently on classical themes, as in his relatively lengthy poem "The Sirens' Song" and shorter poems like "Narcissus" and "Eurydice and Orpheus," Thomas is a largely autobiographical poet, a continuator of the Confessional school. But his work also bears a strong relation to the philosophical poetry of Ammons. Although his most frequent mode of expression in nonmetrical verse, his early studies of Frost, Dickinson and Hopkins are still audible in the structural tightness, careful rhythm and lineation of his apparently free verse.
In the early 90's he began, with the assistance of Belle Randall, a teaching career at Cornish College of the Arts and the University of Washington Extension. Subsequently he taught for 12 years at Seattle's University Prep. He spent the 2004-05 academic year as a Fulbright Exchange Teacher in Ceske Budejovice in the Czech Republic. And in 2006 he returned to that provincial capitol to raise a family with Monika Nemcova, a business woman and signatory of Charter 77.