Dr. Tom Bailey

Professor of Creative Writing

Professor of Creative Writing

I was born in the Mississippi Delta—my family is from the tiny town of Indianola, think B.B. King!—and grew up in West Virginia (think of the writers Jayne Anne Phillips and Breece Pancake, and if you haven’t read them: read them!) I graduated from Marshall University in West Virginia with my undergraduate degree in English and history and at the tender age of twenty-three went on to earn my M.F.A. in fiction writing at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, where I held a Teaching-Writing Fellowship, and at the age of 25 my Ph.D. in English Literature from Binghamton University, where, upon graduation, I was awarded the “Distinguished Dissertation Award for the Humanities.” 

Before coming to New College in 2023, I taught for five years in the Expository Writing Program at Harvard, receiving five letters for Excellence for Teaching during my time there, and for 18 years at Susquehanna University—a small, private, liberal arts college in Central, Pennsylvania—ten of those at the rank of Full Professor. At Susquehanna, I was fortunate enough to play a vital role in the development of a new creative writing program—The Writers Institute—a program that became recognized for excellence by prestigious journals such as The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Princeton Review. 

I’ve published six books to date and countless short stories and essays on the art and craft of fiction. Two novels, The Grace That Keeps This World—which was recognized with the Mississippi Institute for Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, given previously to the likes of Walker Percy, Frederick Barthelme, Ellen Gilchrist, Rick Bass, Larry Brown, Richard Ford, Brad Watson, and Donna Tartt—and Cotton Song, both from Random House, Crown Division, under the imprint of Shaye Areheart Books. The literary press, Etruscan, published my collection of short stories, Crow Man, which I fleshed out on the bones of my creative dissertation. When the finished collection came out, Joyce Carol Oates hailed it on the front cover as “an impressive gathering…richly imagined and sensitively crafted stories of loss, mystery, hurt, and unexpected redemption.” Stories from Crow Man have been anthologized in The Pushcart Prize Stories, New Stories from the South, New Voices in Fiction, and Great Jones Street. Richard Ford gave the title story “Crow Man” the nod of an acknowledgment in The Best American Short Stories.

 I’ve authored and edited three books on the writing of the short story from Oxford University Press as well. On Writing Short Stories, now in its second edition, and A Short Story Writer’s Companion. A few years ago, A Short Story Writer’s Companion was translated into Korean, which still tickles me pink.

Along the way I’ve been fortunate enough to have both the novels and short stories I’ve published noted with a host of other awards and recognitions, among them a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship for Fiction, a grant from the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts, and a Newhouse Award from the John Gardner Foundation. My first novel, The Grace That Keeps This World, was chosen as “The One Book, One Community” read for over seventy library book groups throughout Pennsylvania. I’ve aired my work on a slew of NPR affiliates as well as Scott Simon’s Weekend Edition Saturday, had the pleasure of performing my first novel for Books On Tape out in LA, and narrowly missed having The Grace That Keeps This World being made into a feature film starring Bryan Cranston (long story—but durn that Tony he won). I’ve been on major book tours and given more readings than I can count. 

I know it sounds zany to say, but I have another new collection of stories and three new novels forthcoming——so stay tuned!

 I live next door to the college, a tennis ball’s throw away from the bay in Sarasota with my little Jack Russell, Rosie, the official student greeter for the Program in Creative Writing at New College. My older son, Sam, a poet and musician in his own right (check out his music on Spotify under Preacher and Daisy) is working toward his Ph.D. in the Divinity School at Harvard. My daughter, Isabel, another budding poet (what’s with all these poets?), is working toward her Ph.D. in Art History-Architecture at M.I.T. My younger boy, Will, has been off surfing and snowboarding the world. He’s recently sent (poetic?) texts from Portugal, Japan, Puerto Rico, and the French Alps. Now he’s enroute to Vietnam (via Paris, via Las Vegas—long trip, longer story). For those of you so inclined, he writes that the waves off the coast of Portugal are “scary-great!”