Born in Columbus, Ohio, Thompson was educated at University College, Dublin where he received a B.A. in English Language and Literature and an M.A. in English and American Literature (with a thesis on Robert Creeley supervised by Seamus Deane). He did a Ph.D at LSU and taught in the English Department at North Carolina State University for his entire career, where he is now Professor Emeritus. His poetry has been published widely on both sides of the Atlantic. His first collection of poems was The Book of the Floating World (Parlor Press, 2007). His next book was a collection of lyrical essays, After Paradise: Essays on the Fate of American Writing (Shearsman Books, 2009). Shearsman has published all of his subsequent collections of poems, Landscape with Light, (2014), Strange Country (2016), Notebook of Last Things (2019), and The Distances (2024). Thompson was the founding editor of the international, online journal Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry & Poetics, which launched in 2001. He is at present the editor of the poetry series, Free Verse Editions, which has over 100 titles on its list now and is also the editor of Illuminations: A Series on American Poetics. He lives in the U.S. and in Greece.