Tom Healy was raised on a farm in Mount Vision, New York. He earned a BA in philosophy from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. His first collection of poetry, What the Right Hand Knows (2009), was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award and the 2009 Lambda Literary Award in Poetry.
 
Of Healy’s spare yet evocative poems, poet Carol Muske-Dukes commented in the Huffington Post: “From the near-cheerful merciless poems about childhood on a farm and the brutal lives of animals to big city glamour with new possibilities of flight from a flawed paradise—there is the sharp edge of art … keeping things in perspective.”
 
Active in the New York City arts scene, Healy operated a gallery in Chelsea with Pat Hearn and Matthew Marks from 1994 until 2000. He has been executive director of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and a lecturer at Pratt Institute. Healy was a member of President Clinton’s White House Council on AIDS, and was a visiting fellow at the Gorée Institute in Dakar, Senegal.