R. Thomas Sheardy, a lifelong resident of Michigan, lives with his family in Crockery Township, near the big lake that figures prominently in many of his stories. He has been writing most of his life, both fiction and in his profession, but is only recently published. He was a semi-finalist in the 2016 Write Michigan Short Story Competition. His published novel, Slow Dance in a Winter Garden is expected out within a few weeks.

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A retired professor, R. T. Sheardy taught art history, with an emphasis in Native American, Asian and Islamic art, at Hope College, Muskegon Community College and Kendall College of Art and Design. He holds degrees from Michigan State University and pursued graduate studies at the Universidad de las Américas in Puebla, Mexico and at the University of Chicago. His essays in American art history have appeared in The Journal of American Culture (1996), in American Dreams: American Art to 1950 in the Williams College Museum of Art (2001), and in Searching for America; Essays on American Art and Architecture (2006), for which he also served as editor. He is a Smithsonian Fellow, a member of Michigan Writers, the American Culture Association and the Association of Historians of American Art. He has done archaeological work in the jungles of Yucatan, and is an avid traveler. He has most recently visited Peru and the Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan, but he considers Italy his second home. He is also an artist, maintains a large English garden, and raises orchids.

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