James Hall was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, but has spent the last thirty-five years in Florida. He graduated from Florida Presbyterian College (now Eckerd College) in the late Sixties. He went on to do graduate work at Johns Hopkins and University of Utah, and he’s been teaching literature and creative writing at Florida International University for the last 28 years. Many of his former students have gone on to publish novels of their own. Dennis Lehane, Barbara Parker, Vicki Hendricks and Chris Kling all studied with Jim.
He began his writing career as a poet and published four books of poems, three of them with Carnegie-Mellon University Press. He also published short fiction in such magazines as The Georgia Review and Kenyon Review. These stories were later published in a collection called Paper Products.
Hall wrote his first crime thriller, Under Cover of Daylight, in 1986, and he's gone on to publish nine more in the years since, including Rough Draft, Body Language, Red Sky at Night, Buzz Cut, Gone Wild, Mean High Tide, Hard Aground, Bones of Coral, Tropical Freeze, and Under Cover of Daylight. For three years he wrote a monthly column for Sunshine Magazine of the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. These essays along with several others will be published in a collection called Hot Damn.
He lives in Florida with his wife Evelyn and his dogs, Travis and Sofie.