Lacy was born and raised in east Texas, and served in the United States Marines Corps from 1955 to 1959.
He's also been reprinted in anthologies including The Best American Short Stories,[4][5] The Best of Crazyhorse: Thirty Years of Poetry and Fiction, A Ghost at Heart's Edge: Stories and Poems of Adoption, and The Next Parish Over: A Collection of Irish American Writing.
[6] His fiction was first collected in book form in The Natural Father: Stories, released in 1997 by New Rivers Press.
In 2021, Stephen F. Austin State University Press released The House on Brown Street, a collection of his essays.
Among Lacy's notable essays is "Icarus," published in the fall 2003 issue of North Dakota Quarterly and focusing on Arnold Samuelson, who in 1934 hitchhiked from Minneapolis to Key West to meet Ernest Hemingway and later wrote a book about the author.