- Jim Grimsley
Infobox Writer
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name = Jim Grimsley
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birthdate = birth year and age|1955
birthplace =United States
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occupation = novelist, playwright
nationality = American
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website =Jim Grimsley (born 1955) is an American
novelist andplaywright .Biography
Born to a troubled rural family in
Pollocksville, North Carolina [ [http://www.glbtq.com/literature/grimsley_j.html Grimsley bio at the Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture] ] , Grimsley said of his childhood that "for us in the South, the family is a field where craziness grows like weeds". [ "Out of Silence," 1998 ]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 "
Winter Birds " was rejected as "too dark" by American publishers for ten years before appearing in a German edition; it only appeared in English two years later. The novel then brought Grimsley much recognition: theSue 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 "My Drowning ", which won the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Writers' Award. Subsequently he wrote thehigh fantasy novel "Kirith Kirin ", which won theLambda 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").Four of Grimsley's plays are collected in "
Mr. Universe and Other Plays ".Bibliography
Grimsley, Jim, "Out of Silence", Brightleaf: A Southern Review ofBooks", 3, March/April 1998http://www.brightleaf-review.com/Mar98/grimsley.html.
Grimsley, Jim, "Who We Are", Publishers Weekly, September 30, 1996, pp 46-47
Howorth, Lisa. "Jim Grimsley: Tales of Southern Courage", PublishersWeekly, November 5, 1999, pp 39-40
Notes
External links
* [http://literati.net/Grimsley Jim Grimsley home page] on [http://literati.net/ Literati.net.]
* [http://www.creativewriting.emory.edu/faculty/grimsley.html Jim Grimsley at Emory University]
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* [http://www.scifi.com/sfw/books/sfw14279.html Review, "The Last Green Tree"]
* [http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue368/books.html Review, "The Ordinary"]
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