Meet Terrance Hayes, who’s sparking romance rumours with ex-Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi – the award-winning American poet and academic is also an English professor at New York University

Jan 9 , 2025

Top Chef star Padma Lakshmi is rumoured to be dating poet Terrance Hayes. Photos: @padmalakshmi/Instagram, @operaphila/Instagram

They dated briefly in 2021 and were seen together numerous times in 2024; Hayes is a well-known literary figure and has 2 children from a previous marriage, to fellow poet Yona Harvey

The new year may have brought an old flame back into the life of former Top Chef TV star Padma Lakshmi, 54.

The famous television host has been the subject of rumours of a reconciliation with her ex-boyfriend, Terrance Hayes, since early last year. The couple briefly dated in 2021 and split the same year … but were spotted hand-in-hand again in New York last April, reported People.

Padma Lakshmi attends a special screening of movie The Room Next Door in New York, in December. Photo: Getty Images/AFP

While neither offered any confirmation or denial of a rekindled romance, they were photographed together again in September at the Free Future 2024 event in New York to combat gender violence across the globe. Then the pair were spotted on December 29, looking loved-up as they took a pre-New Year stroll in SoHo with Lakshmi’s pup Divina in tow.

Just who is Terrance Hayes, who seems to have convinced the presenter, author and activist to give him a second chance?

Terrance Hayes’ background is in academia

Terrance Hayes hails from Columbia, South Carolina. Photo: terrancehayes.com

Hayes, 53, is from Columbia, South Carolina, per his website. He attended Coker College, where he studied English and painting. While he was there, a professor contacted celebrated author Maya Angelou to help convince Hayes to pursue creative writing, Hayes told the website Literary Hub in 2018. He also played basketball in college, which earned him Academic All-American honours. He later earned his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh.

He’s a poet

Terrance Hayes released his seventh poetry collection, So to Speak, in 2023. Photo: Penguin Poets

Hayes is an award-winning poet. He has several collections under his belt, such as his debut work, Muscular Music (1999), which won the Whiting Writers Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; the National Book Award-winning Lighthead (2010); and American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, which bagged him the 2019 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. In 2014 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and his most recent collection, So to Speak, was released in 2023.