Donald "Skip" Hays

The novelist and retired University of Arkansas professor Donald "Skip" Hays passed away on the morning of November 21, 2025 at the age of seventy-eight at his home in Fayetteville, Arkansas, after a long bout with cancer. He is survived by his wife Patty, his son Gabe and three grandchildren.

Hays's first novel, The Dixie Association, was a finalist for the 1985 PEN/Faulkner award and was followed in 1990 by The Hangman's Children, a Los Angeles Times Critics Choice selection. His 2007 story collection, Dying Light and Other Stories, received accolades from numerous writers, including Colum McCann, Ellen Gilchrist, Sabina Murray and Christopher Castellani.

His forthcoming novel, The Great Awakening, completed only months before his death, will be published by Regal House in May 2026. It has already earned ecstatic praise from Richard Russo, Ron Rash, George Singleton, Sabina Murray, Tom Franklin and Steve Yarbrough. Susan Perabo says that "this masterpiece by Donald Hays says everything that needs saying about this broken time in this broken country. A beautifully written book about ugliness. A terrifying, hilarious, brutally honest all-American howl."

Hays was a graduate of the University of Southern Arkansas, where he excelled as a baseball player after having been a multi-sport athlete in high school, in Van Buren, Arkansas. Later, he earned an MFA from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where he eventually joined the faculty himself and mentored dozens of writers who have gone on to major success as novelists and screenwriters.

The son of a Navy veteran, Hays was nicknamed "Skip" by his father, who fondly hoped that one day his son would become a Navy skipper. Nevetheless, during the Vietnam War, Skip Hays became a conscientious objector who, rather than leaving the country to avoid punishment, agreed to perform janitorial work in the psychiatric ward at the UAMS Medical Center in Little Rock. Hays's many longtime friends came to see that episode as perhaps the definitive one, as he was fiercely devoted to principles. And the principle he held most dear was following the dictates of his own conscience whether that met with favor or not. Another deeply held principle was loyalty to family and friends.

It was no accident, then, that when news of his illness began to circulate among his former students, as well as his own former high school, college and graduate school classmates, so many people wanted to visit him from different parts of the country that it became necessary to schedule them between cancer treatments. Among the last to see him, only hours before his death, were two of his former students, with whom he laughed and told stories for a good part of his final evening.

News about a memorial service will follow in a few days.

Memorial contributions may be to Doctors Without Borders, and the ACLU

To place an online tribute, please visit www.bernafuneralhomes.com