Join Us for a Conversation With Award-Winning Author Michael Loyd Gray

It seems that with each passing day, our society is becoming more and more obsessed with fame. We spend countless hours watching, reading about, and sometimes even stalking, those who have it. For many people, fame is the ultimate dream, even if it means they have to air their dirty laundry on a reality show to get it. Rarely does anyone consider the downside of living in this golden fishbowl, but award-winning author Michael Loyd Gray does just that in his excellent new novel, Not Famous Anymore.

Elliott Adrian is in many ways a Hollywood cliché: small town boy who made good; a movie star with a mansion, a collection of sports cars, and an entourage of sycophants to fulfill his every desire; another celebrity behaving badly, without a care for anyone but himself. But beneath the flippant, arrogant façade beats the heart of an empty, desperately unhappy man. After his latest alcohol-fueled stunt lands him in rehab, Elliott decides he’s cashing in his chips and leaving L.A.—and fame—for good.

Disguising himself with a mustache, a cowboy hat and a series of vehicles that have seen better days, Elliott escapes his golden cage and begins driving back to the Midwest. He is not sure what he is doing, but he knows he is driven by an inexplicable need to make things simpler. What he finds, however, is that his life is about to get a heck of a lot more complicated.

In creating the rich world of his novels, Michael Loyd Gray draws both on his own experiences and the many pearls of wisdom he has gleaned from literature, music, and movies. His work, he has said, is inspired by that of Ernest Hemingway, but also writers such as Bobbie Anne Mason, Ellen Gilchrist, Raymond Carver, Stuart Dybek, Daniel Curley, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Whether you are a published author, aspiring writer, or just someone who loves a good read, you'll thoroughly enjoy listening to Michael Loyd Gray speak about his love of literature and his own creative process. Click below to listen to the podcast.

Michael Loyd Gray is an award-winning author, journalist and college professor. Born in Arkansas and raised in Champaign, Illinois, he has also lived and worked in New York, Arizona, Texas, and Michigan. He has a MFA from Western Michigan University and a Journalism degree from the University of Illinois. His novel Well Deserved won the 2008 Sol Books Prose Series Award. His story "Little Man" won the 2005 Alligator Juniper Fiction Prize and the 2005 The Writers Place Award for Fiction. Not Famous Anymore was awarded a grant by the Elizabeth George Foundation. December’s Children, another of his novels, was a finalist for the 2006 Sol Books Prose Series Prize and is forthcoming in 2012 from Sol Books as the young adult novel, King Biscuit.

Currently, Michael is a full-time online English professor at South University, where he co-founded Asynchronous, the student literary journal.

Not Famous Anymore is available for purchase on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.