Jeffrey Allen Mays was born in the fabled and wartorn city of Memphis, Tennessee, the youngest of three sons in an oil-business family. His father’s work required them to relocate every two or three years to cities around the American south and southwest, but included a three year residence in Sydney, New South Wales, in the faraway land of Australia. Eventually, the relocations stopped and the family settled deep in the humid pine forests of the affluent north Houston suburb of Kingwood. The drinking age was 18 (not that it mattered), the beach at Galveston was an easy drive, and what’s known today as “classic rock” poured out of the FM radio stations fresh and new.
In college, he studied Computer Science: the most lucrative and promising career on the glossy chart in the guidance counselor’s office. But that fickle minx withheld her fruits from him, and like a migrant worker dressed in Business Casual, he wandered from job to job.
Among those early Pyrrhic endeavors was a one-semester stint as a Junior High math teacher (a position he quit at Christmas lest he go insane). Other employments were vaudevillian travesties in their own right. There were long quiet days alone in an office punctuated by requests to install a new hard drive or run a print job of 4000 envelopes.
In 2000, he completed a seminary degree thinking to find solace as a man of the cloth. The four years spent as a Presbyterian minister provided enough material for a virtual Summa Horrifica, and unwittingly became the seed of his fiction writing.
Taking an underground railroad out of the clerical life, by the dark of night, search hounds baying not far behind, and with only such possessions as he could carry, he smuggled his wife and four kids to Austin, Texas.
He currently works in marketing and technical development at Novare Science and Math, a new publisher of science and math curriculum for private schools.
Jeffrey has written non-fiction articles, web contents, blogs, sermons, short stories, poems, and love songs. His work has been published by Design Studios, Newsbyrd, Catapult, Topology and Z-composition. His short story "Malefic" was included in the 2013 "eco-horror" anthology Growing Concerns and his debut novel, The Former Hero, was published in September 2014 by AEC Stellar Publishing.
He still lives in Austin with his family.
