Terry Kay

Terry Kay was born on February 10, 1938 in Hart County, and was the 11th of the 12 children for T. H. Kay and Viola Winn Kay. His days were spent exploring the Georgia country side, working on the family farm and playing football at Royston High School. After high school, he attended and graduated from West Georgia Junior College, and then LaGrange College and later married Tommie Georgia Author Terry Kay Duncan. Today he is on the statewide Board of Directors for the Georgia Friends of the Library

Kay worked several jobs before deciding to devote his time to being a full-time author. Kay has worked as an insurance salesman, a sportswriter and film/theatre critic for the Atlanta Journal, a creative director and account executive for Walburn & Associates public relations, and a senior vice-president at the Oglethorpe Power Corporation. However, in 1989, he left OPC to concentrate full time on writing. It was a risky, but wise move. In 1990, his signature novel, To Dance with the White Dog, was released.

Of course, Kay was no stranger to the literary field. In fact, he had written his first novel, The Year the Lights Came On, in 1976 with the encouragement of Pat Conroy. The book is a nostalgia piece about Kay’s Georgia childhood and is set in the fabricated town of Eden, Georgia. Kay’s best-selling books, for the most part, are set in fictitious Georgia locations, with the exception of his novel, Shadow Song which is set in New York’s Catskill Mountains.

Today, Terry Kay can be found at his Athens, Georgia home with his wife. The couple has four children, ten grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

Terry Kay is a master at joining words together to create beautiful writing. This webmaster is a huge fan of this author's writing and experienced Kay's talent as an orator when he heard the author speak the beautiful words below:

While Reading

While reading, I have been –
        -- A cowboy (and an Indian) with Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour
        -- A Confederate soldier with Joseph Pennell and Philip Lee Williams
        -- A pirate with Robert Louis Stevenson
        -- An orphan with Charles Dickens
        -- A dust-bowl traveler with John Steinbeck

While reading, I have been –
        -- A whaler with Herman Melville
        -- A gold-dreamer with Erskine Caldwell
        -- A small-town barber with Wendell Berry
        -- A runaway with Mark Twain
        -- An old-time gospel god with James Weldon Johnson

While reading, I have been –
        -- A b-flat coronet player with William Price Fox
        -- A battler of windmills with Miguel de Cervantes
        -- An attendant in the House of Gentle Men with Kathy Hepinstall
        -- A basketball player with Pat Conroy, a fire-fighter with Larry Brown, a defense attorney with       John Grisham.

While reading, I have touched the ocean's darkest depths and walked on planets in solar systems beyond our seeing.

I have climbed mountains lost in clouds, and walked the different road with Robert Frost and gazed at the little cat feet of fog with Carl Sandburg and danced to the language-music of Byron Herbert Reece and Dana Wildsmith and David Bottoms.

I have flown with Lindbergh and John Glenn, stood at Gettysburg with Lincoln and in Montgomery with Martin Luther King, Jr.

While reading, I was at Dachau on the day of liberation.

While reading, I have sat at the feet of Abraham and Moses and Jesus and Muhammad and Buddha, and all the other men of God, and also those who would kill God -- the insane, the madmen, the bigoted, the fanatics.

While reading, I have been boy and man, girl and woman. I have been young and old. I have died and have been re-born.

While reading, I have become people I cannot be, doing things I cannot do. And I do not know of another experience that could have given me such a life.

Terry Kay
Copyright, 2006

Works by Terry Kay

Novels

Other books

To Whom the Angel Spoke: A Story of the Christmas (1991)
Special K: The Wisdom of Terry Kay (2000)

Teleplays

Run Down the Rabbit

Plays

Piano Cabaret

Awards

The Georgia Author of the Year Award in 1981 for After Eli
The Southeastern Library Association Outstanding Author of the Year Award in 1991 for To Dance with the White Dog, which was twice nominated for the American Booksellers Association's Book of the Year.
An Emmy in 1990 for his original teleplay Run Down the Rabbit.
LaGrange College awarded him an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters in 1999
He was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2006
He received a Governor's Award in the Humanities in 2009
2011 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Georgia Writers Association

Video of Terry Kay Discussing The Book of Marie

Video of Terry Kay talking about The Book of Marie at Georgia Perimeter College.

Terry Kay

While Reading

Works by Terry Kay

Read more about Terry Kay at the pages below

Video of Terry Kay Discussing The Book of Marie