TOM MENDICINO

Tom Mendicino’s writing ambitions were first encouraged as an undergraduate at Penn where he was mentored by renowned authors Elaine Scarry, Jerre Mangione, and Mark Harris. Those auspicious beginnings were soon derailed following a disastrous few weeks at the MFA program at Denver where he quickly learned he wasn’t cut from the academic cloth. He bounced back to New York where he happily toiled in the publishing industry as what was then called a ‘book traveller’ for, first, a small architectural publishing firm and, later, Columbia University Press. In 1985, he enrolled in the law school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was a working attorney for over thirty years, the last twenty-five practicing exclusively in hospitals and academic medical centers. The writing bug began to bite again in the early nineties and he began publishing short stories in numerous queer anthologies. Tom is particularly proud that the American Library Association cited his debut novel Probation (Kensington 2010) as a Barbara Gittings Literature Award Stonewall Honor Book as Barbara, the legendary LGBT civil rights pioneer, was a long time close personal friend of his husband. Probation, a twist on the standard coming-out story steeped in Southern regionalism, was also a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. He turned to the completely different genre of noir in his well-received second novel The Boys from Eighth and Carpenter (Kensington 2105), a crime story saturated in the Philadelphia Italian-American immigrant community (INDIEFAB Book of the Year, Silver Award Winner; Lambda Literary Award Finalist, Best Gay Mystery; Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist; Eric Hoffer Book Awards Finalist; Independent Book Publisher (IPPY) Award, Gold Award Winner). While working on Boys, Tom also published a trio of novellas about the turbulent relationship between two very different young men that was subsequently released in the omnibus edition Stealing Home (Kensington 2106) (Lambda Literary Award Finalist, Best Gay Romance; Foreword INDIES, Best Gay Adult Fiction Finalist). His novella “Away in a Manager” was included in the anthology “Remembering Christmas” (Kensington 2011). Tom’s non-fiction writing has been published in “The Wall Street Journal” and “The Miami Herald”.