Born in Minneapolis and raised in Spokane, Bill Hayes studied writing at Santa Clara University, where he received a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1983. For the past decade, he has supported himself as a freelance writer. He lives in New York.
Hayes began publishing essays, articles, and criticism in 1990. Addressing a range of topics—the AIDS epidemic, insomnia, and Diane Arbus, among others—his work has appeared in numerous national publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Details, Salon, and The Threepenny Review, as well as in the anthology The Man I Might Become (2002). He is the author of three books.
Hayes’s first book, Sleep Demons: An Insomniac’s Memoir (Washington Square Press 2001), received glowing reviews in Entertainment Weekly, Out, Kirkus Review, and others. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly called Sleep Demons, “An intelligent, beautifully written book … that variously reads like a journey of scientific discovery, a personal memoir, and a literary episode of Ripley’s Believe It or Not.” A Book Sense 76 pick and a selection of Book of the Month Club, Sleep Demons became a national bestseller.
Hayes’s second book, Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood (Ballantine Books/Random House 2005), interweaves memoir and medical history in a compelling look at the five quarts of vital fluid that runs through each of us. “Hayes is on his way to becoming one of those rare authors who can tackle just about any subject in book form, and make you glad he did,” critic Steve Kettmann observed in his San Francisco Chronicle review of Five Quarts.
His latest book, The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray's Anatomy, to be released by Ballantine/Random House in late December 2007, is a narrative nonfiction account of the story behind the nineteenth-century classic revered by doctors and artists alike, Gray’s Anatomy. “Bill Hayes has written a thrilling book that is simultaneously an autobiography, a biography of Henry Gray, a scientific essay on our human anatomy, and a heart-breaking elegy,” author Richard Rodriguez notes. “I do not know another book like it.”
Hayes has served as a guest lecturer at Stanford’s Fellowship Forum, the University of San Francisco, UCSF, and at the Bay Area History of Medicine Club, and has taught writing workshops at UCSF Medical School and The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. He has appeared on many national broadcasts, including the NPR program To the Best of Our Knowledge and A&E channel’s Breakfast with the Arts. In recognition of his writing, Bill Hayes was honored as a 2005 Library Laureate by the San Francisco Public Library.
Courtesy of Red Room dot com.