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 bio
Hi. My name is Dale
Bailey. By day I teach college English--I'm a professor at Lenoir-Rhyne
College--but by night (and week-end and in every other spare moment,
and, of course, always in my heart) I’m a writer. Most of what I write
might best be called weird fiction--which is to say that it’s not quite
science fiction, it’s not quite fantasy, and it’s not really horror,
either. The bulk of my stories partake of all three of those
genres--and a little bit of something else, too.
As a kid (yes, I'll admit it: a somewhat scrawny, geeky kid) back in
Princeton, West Virginia, I spent most of my time reading, toting home
library books by writers ranging from H. P. Lovecraft and Ray Bradbury
to Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. By the time I was seven or
eight, I was already writing stories of my own (and illustrating them,
stapling them together, and passing them out to family and friends more
often than not). I started a novel in the fourth grade, and in
1979--the International Year of the Child--the unfinished manuscript won
me a spot as one of ten United States delegates to a children's arts
conference in Sofia, Bulgaria. That early success must have cemented my
ambitions because not long after I got back--I suppose I would have
been about twelve years old--I started submitting my stories for
publication.
A lot has changed in the years since then. These days I tend to buy my
books rather than check them out of the library, and I'm not as scrawny
as I used to be (I'm still kind of a geek, though). I don't make it
back home to West Virginia as often as I'd like to, either. I live in
Hickory, North Carolina, with my wife, the lovely and talented Jean
Singley Bailey (and without her support--financial, emotional, and
otherwise--through some lean years in the writing game, you probably
wouldn't be reading this page). We share our home with one daughter
(Carson: also lovely and talented), one fish, and way too many cats.
My love for the fantastic remains unabated, but I've also developed lots
of other passions as a reader. By the time I finished my PhD in English
at the University of Tennessee in 1997, I’d read pretty widely in the
canon of British and American classics, and these days the books on my
bedside table reflect the boundless variety of contemporary fiction,
from John Crowley and Joyce Carol Oates to Richard North Patterson and
Richard Ford.
My own fiction is an attempt to mediate all these influences--and of
course to incorporate my own life experience. Ten years after I
collected my first personal rejection letter (from Stanley Schmidt, God
bless him, at Analog), I attended the Clarion Writers Workshop at
Michigan State University in 1992. Kris Rusch, Clarion's
editor-in-residence, bought a story for The Magazine of Fantasy &
Science Fiction during my third week at the workshop. I’ve sold
about twenty-five short stories in the decade or so since. Most of my
stuff has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction,
but I’ve also sold stories to Amazing Stories, Pulphouse,
Alchemy, and SciFiction.
My stories have been reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror,
Nebula Awards 31, and the two most recent collections of The
Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction. But if you’re looking to find
them in one convenient package, check out my collection,
The
Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories, published by Golden
Gryphon Press (2003). It includes both the title story--a Nebula
nominee in 1995, presently under option to Twentieth Century Fox--and
“Death and Suffrage,” winner of a 2003 International Horror Guild Award.
I’ve also written three novels.
The Fallen, published by Signet
Books in 2002, was a finalist for the International Horror Guild Award
and a preliminary finalist for the Bram Stoker Award (both in the First
Novel category). House of Bones, also from Signet, came out in
December 2003. A third novel--this one a noir thriller written in
collaboration with Jack Slay, Jr.--is tentatively scheduled for
publication in 2005.
Finally, I occasionally write non-fiction as well. Bowling Green State
University Popular Press published
American Nightmares: The Haunted
House Formula in American Popular Fiction, a study of contemporary
American horror fiction, in 1999, and--perhaps fittingly, given the
nature of my work--I also contribute regularly to The Dodge Magazine,
published by one of the world's leading manufacturers of embalming
equipment and chemicals.
Want to know more about my work? Drop me a line:
dale@dalebailey.com
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