Dream Kids

Out of place at an experimental high school, sensitive high school junior Bryce Hughes steals his father’s pharmaceutical sales samples to stay steady and share recreationally with his wealthy, spoiled, nihilistic friends at their wild weekend parties. Hopelessly hung up on his ex-girlfriend, Paige, whose emotions are as fickle as her taste for fashion, Bryce can barely see the quiet scholarship girl, Jaycee, who adores him.

Over the course of a single school year, Bryce and his crew from The Dream Academy have to survive classes they don’t understand, work in the real world, pressure to uphold their school’s public brand, betrayals and cyberbullying that threatens to push one of their own over the edge.

Each lost Dream Kid must find a way to save their future, their sense of self, and their passions while fighting to reconcile who they are at heart with who they are believed to be by others.

Order your copy here, at Powells, through Amazon or Barnes and Noble

My transgressive novel The Vice Sutra is being published as a serial on the membership Channillo. You can subscribe and read it by following this link.

Roller Girls Love Bobby Knight, Artistically Declined Press (May 2014)

Michael Wayne Hampton’s Roller Girls Love Bobby Knight is a fierce, hilarious bruise-fest of a novella. A man has no right to know this much about women—the way they think and feel and talk about sex, music, rollerblading, “Hell Yeah” men, and the aesthetics of competitive girl brawls. But Hampton does know, and his knowledge is equal parts funny, scary, and tender. Beneath its shimmery, crack-you-up tour de force exterior swims a love story about a sexy, hard-scrabble mother and her two renegade daughters, breaking hearts, knocking heads, and taking no prisoners. Hampton’s got talent to burn, and these roller girls burn, burn, burn.
—K. L. Cook, author of Love Songs for the Quarantined and Last Call

Equal parts tent revival preacher and cage match announcer, Michael Wayne Hampton dives inside the raucous, twanged-up world of DIY roller derby to find the kick-drum heart of contemporary rural Kentucky in his lively love letter to sisterhood, community, and good old-fashioned ass-kicking. Buckle up, girls and boys — Roller Girls Love Bobby Knight is hell on wheels.
— Erin Keane, author of Demolition of the Promised Land

“>IndieBound 

Barnes and Noble   Amazon

Romance for Delinquents, Foxhead Books (January 2014)

In stories that bring to mind Breece D’J Pancake and Harry Crews, but in a voice all their own, Michael Wayne Hampton’s characters fight the hard fight—often facing a life and landscape as stubborn and unforgiving as a rusted engine bolt. Told in voices that are remarkable for their authenticity, Hampton’s people are memorable, his prose is lapidary in its precision, and his stories are hard to forget. Rob Roberge, author of The Cost of Living

“Michael Wayne Hampton is a born storyteller. And that doesn’t just mean he can spin a good yarn, the kind that keeps you ear-stuck and tongue-tied, listening hard. He also has the storyteller’s art of absolute authenticity, fidelity to hard-knocked voices – while writing prose that lifts and transcends, that fiercely proclaims that through the ugly, all of us are living some kind of beautiful.”  Amber Sparks, author of May We Shed These Human Bodies                                    

“These are bold, insistent stories of people dancing along the edges of epiphany and oblivion. Hampton’s America is ragged, dangerous, and utterly engaging.” Ian Stansel, author of Everybody’s Irish

Amazon

Bad Kids from Good Schools

(Winged City Chapbook Press 2013)

“…Michael Wayne Hampton knows these bad kids all too well as he sings their song, tells their tales, and achingly wrenches something meaningful out of their already lost and drifting lives.”

– Ben Tanzer, author of Orphans

“At best most of us can only reflect on how the world seemed to us as kids, blocks of images, spliced scenes from home movies. Not Michael Wayne Hampton. This book is an achievement in storytelling and craft to be envied and read again and again.”

– Sheldon Lee Compton, author of The Same Terrible Storm

Out of print. Contact author for copies.