Tom Jay was born in Manhattan, Kansas, in 1943. An active member of the Northwest art community since 1966, he built the first bronze-casting facility for Seattle University and supervised construction of casting facilities at the University of Washington. Receiving an MFA from the University of Washington in 1969, he established Riverdog Fine Arts Foundry, which cast his own work and that of sculptors throughout the Northwest. He and his wife, Sara Mall Johani, engaged the community imagination in place-based culture through art, festivals, and salmon-restoration projects. His essays and poems were collected in The Blossoms Are Ghosts at the Wedding. A revised and expanded edition was published by Empty Bowl Press in 2019, the year Tom died.