"We called my farmer grandfather Pappy. His Christmas gift each year was a two-dollar bill stuffed into a white bank envelope, my five-letter name variously—but always badly—misspelled on the outside. I still have a few of those bills, stagnant in the envelopes his creased hands must have sealed. Thomas Jefferson’s face peeks out from the little oval window. My grandad might not have known who Jefferson was. But Pappy did know that green paper had value, and that it was damn sure hard to come by. It must have been on my mother’s wise forbidding that my child-self didn’t drop the deuces on eight packs of baseball cards. Today, I think of them as a message that he loved me, even if he never spoke it. And of the envelopes as witness to a hardscrabble upbringing that couldn’t grant much heed to book learning."
Reynolds holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University, an MFA from the University of Tampa and an MAT from Belmont University. ​His short stories have appeared in The Nashville Review, The Water~Stone Review, The Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine, and elsewhere. Additionally, Reynolds’ fiction has been awarded the Porch Prize, nominated for a Pushcart, and Honorably Mentioned for the Lorian Hemingway prize. ​His essays have been read on NPR and in multiple live venues including The Jerome Stern Reading Series. They, too, are regularly featured in local print and digital media and will appear in the forthcoming book Educator Reflections: The Power of Our Stories published by the MTSU Open Press. ​Reynolds taught creative writing, literature and essay composition at Florida State University prior to his current lectureship at Middle Tennessee State University.
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​Lived experiences include a childhood spent jumping pasture fences and learning how to throw, hit, and catch differently shaped balls, a decade of secondary, collegiate and professional coaching, and a second half adulthood founding, growing, and selling two successful landscape design/build companies. Along the way, he’s broken twentyish bones, blown a knee out, had his face stitched up a few times and survived two tax audits. He remains a certified arborist and industry consultant but is grateful for ibuprofen and an educator’s and author’s life these days.