Thomas Meyer was born and grew up in Seattle. He graduated from Bard College. There he studied under Robert Kelly. And there he met Jonathan Williams and joined his non-profit publishing enterprise the Jargon Society for the next forty years as life partner, helpmate, and custodian, editing, producing, and designing fifty some titles. Together they spent part of each year in the Yorkshire Dales and mountains of western North Carolina.

Meyer is the author of several books of poetry, whose recent titles include Kintsugi (Flood Editions), Essay Stanzas (The Song Cave), and Porcelain Pillow (Lunar Chandelier Collective). He has made notable translations of the tao te ching, i ching, Beowulf, Pindar, Sappho, and Mallarmé. His essays and reviews have appeared in Parnassus, the American Book Review, Credences, Sulfur, and Prose. He was the recipient of an NEA Creative Fellowship in Poetry, an Ingram-Merrill Award for Poetry and an NEA Opera & Music Theater (New American Works) Creative Fellowship for Librettists. Poems of his have been set to music by Craig Carnahan, James Sellars, and Conrad Cummings.

Presently he and his husband, to whom his book Modern Love: Songs is dedicated, live an Epicurean life looking out upon the Solway Firth with the Lakeland Fells at their backs.