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James W. Hall is an American author and professor from Florida. He has written several novels, poetry, a collection of short stories, and a collection of essays. His novels include The Big Finish, Dead Last, Silencer, Under Cover of Daylight, Hard Aground, Gone Wild, Buzz Cut, Red Sky at Night, and Hells Bay. His writing includes the collection of personal essays Hot Damn, written for the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel's Sunshine Magazine, Washington Post and Miami Herald.
His two short story collections are Paper Products and Over Exposure. Over Exposure includes the short story "The Carch", winner of an Edgar Award. He also won a John D. MacDonald Award for Excellence in Florida Fiction, presented by the JDM Bibliophile.
He was a Fulbright professor of literature in Spain and is a professor of literature and writing at Florida International University. He and his wife Evelyn and their three dogs divide their time between South Florida and the mountains of western North Carolina.
James W. Hall's website
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Where are you from? How--if at all--has your sense of place colored
your writing?
I grew up in a small town in Kentucky, but I've spent the last thirty
years in Florida. Twenty-five of that has been in Miami and the Florida Keys.
Even after all that time, I still find Florida wonderfully exotic, strange and
beautiful and full of the oddest wildlife, both animal and human. I find the
weather, the quality of sunlight, the always-changing scent on the seabreeze to
be a powerful force. South Florida particularly has a reputation as a wild and
dangerous place, and, yes, it is. But it's also very beautiful, still very
natural and unspoiled in many ways. My characters are usually very aware of and
affected by the settings they inhabit. It would seem silly for characters to
move through an environment as rich and influential as South Florida and not be
moved by it in some way.
When and why did you begin writing? When did you first consider
yourself a writer?
For many years in college I wrote poetry. Then after graduating, I
continued my studies of poetry in grad school at Johns Hopkins University and
University of Utah. I published four books of poetry and lots of short stories
in literary magazines before I ...
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