Jim Grimsley
Jim Grimsley | |
|---|---|
| Born | September 21, 1955 Grifton, North Carolina, United States |
| Occupation | Novelist, playwright |
| Nationality | American |
| Website | |
| literati | |
Jim Grimsley (born September 21, 1955) is an American novelist and playwright.
Biography[]
Born to a rural family in Grifton, North Carolina,[1] Grimsley said of his childhood that "for us in the South, the family is a field where craziness grows like weeds".[2]
After moving to Atlanta he would spend nearly twenty years as a secretary at Atlanta's Grady Memorial Hospital before joining the creative-writing faculty at Emory University. During those years, Grimsley wrote prolifically, with fourteen of his plays produced between 1983 and 1993.
Writing[]
His initial forays into novel writing were less successful than his dramatic work. The semiautobiographical was rejected as "too dark" by American publishers for ten years before appearing in a German edition; it only appeared in English sometime two years later. The novel then brought Grimsley much recognition: the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a PEN/Hemingway Award citation.
It was followed by Dream Boy which received the American Library Association's Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Book Award for Literature (Stonewall Book Award), and , which won the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Writers' Award. Subsequently, he wrote the high fantasy novel , which won the Lambda Literary Award, or 'Lammy', for best gay-themed science fiction or fantasy for the year 2000. This classically themed fantasy work was followed by two science fiction novels, The Ordinary and The Last Green Tree (2006 sequel to The Ordinary). His novel Forgiveness (ISBN 9780292716698) was published in 2007. Four of Grimsley's plays are collected in .
He was awarded the Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists' Prize by the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in 2007.[3]
In 2015 Grimlsey published a memoir entitled How I Shed My Skin: Unlearning the Racist Lessons of a Southern Childhood.[4]
References[]
Notes[]
- ^ Schumock, Jim (1999). Jim Grimsley. Story, story, story: conversations with American authors. Black Heron Press. ISBN 9780930773519. Retrieved September 21, 2011.
- ^ (2001). Dews, C.L. Barney (ed.). Out in the South. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. p. 232. ISBN 1566398142. Retrieved February 17, 2017.
- ^ "Saints and Sinners Literary Festival". bestofneworleans.com, May 8, 2007.
- ^ Kenan, Randall (June 5, 2015). "'How I Shed My Skin,' by Jim Grimsley". The New York Times.
Bibliography[]
- Grimsley, Jim, Out of Silence, Brightleaf: A Southern Review of Books, 3, March/April 1998
- Grimsley, Jim, Who We Are, Publishers Weekly, September 30, 1996, pp 46–47
- Howorth, Lisa. Jim Grimsley: Tales of Southern Courage, Publishers Weekly, November 5, 1999, pp. 39–40.
External links[]
- Jim Grimsley home page
- Jim Grimsley at Emory University
- Jim Grimsley at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
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- 1955 births
- 20th-century American novelists
- 21st-century American novelists
- American male novelists
- American science fiction writers
- Gay writers
- Lambda Literary Award winners
- Stonewall Book Award winners
- LGBT writers from the United States
- Living people
- People from Jones County, North Carolina
- Novelists from North Carolina
- LGBT novelists
- LGBT people from North Carolina
- People from Grifton, North Carolina
- Writers of American Southern literature
- 20th-century American male writers
- 21st-century American male writers
- Novelists from Louisiana
- Emory University faculty