About Tommy Hays

Tommy Hays’s latest novel, The Pleasure Was Mine, has been chosen for Alamance Reads 2011 and the Rockingham County Read 2011. The Pleasure Was Mine was also chosen for One City One Book in Greensboro and the Amazing Read—Greenville, SC’s first community-wide reading of a single book. The novel was read on National Public Radio’s “Radio Reader” and South Carolina ETV-Radio’s “Southern Read”. It was a Finalist for the SIBA (Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance) Fiction Award.

Because The Pleasure Was Mine is in part about Alzheimer’s, Hays has been asked to speak at caregiver and aging conferences around the country, including the Bryan Alzheimer’s Disease and Research Center Conference at Duke Medical School. He was a panelist on a care giving segment with Gail Sheehy, New York Times writer Robert Lypsite and brain researcher Esther Sternberg for the series, Life (Part II), which aired on PBS nationally last fall.

Hays has written two other novels—Sam’s Crossing (Atheneum) and In the Family Way (Random House), a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and winner of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award. He is Executive Director of the Great Smokies Writing Program and a Lecturer in the Master of Liberal Arts Program at UNC Asheville. He also teaches in the Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing Program at Murray State University. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, he received his BA in English from Furman University and graduated from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He lives in Asheville with his wife, Connie, and their two children, Max and Ruth.