Born to Jamaican parents in the Bronx, he grew up there and in Kingston, Jamaica. Glave is a graduate of Bowdoin College and Brown University. He is an associate professor of English at Binghamton University, State University of New York, where he teaches creative writing and courses on Caribbean literature, among other topics.

A two-time New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, Glave's essay collection Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent won the Lambda Literary Award in 2005. Glave also received an O. Henry Prize for this book, becoming the second gay African American writer, after James Baldwin, to have won this award. He has also earned a Fine Arts Center in Provincetown Fellowship, and a Fulbright fellowship to Jamaica. While there, he worked on issues of social justice, and helped found the Jamaica Forum of Lesbians, All-Sexuals, and Gays (J-Flag). He is the 2008-2009 Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Professor in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Thomas Glave is the author of Whose Song? and Other Stories (City Lights Publishing, 2000), The Torturer's Wife (City Lights Publishing, 2008), the essay collection Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent (University of Minnesota Press, 2005), and is editor of the anthology Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles (Duke University Press, 2008).