Jim Grimsley
Encyclopedia
Biography
Born to a troubled rural family in Rocky Mount, North CarolinaRocky Mount, North Carolina
Rocky Mount is an All-America City Award-winning city in Edgecombe and Nash counties in the coastal plains of the state of North Carolina. Although it was not formally incorporated until February 28, 1867, the North Carolina community that became the city of Rocky Mount dates from the beginning of...
, Grimsley said of his childhood that "for us in the South, the family is a field where craziness grows like weeds".
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
Emory University
Emory University is a private research university in metropolitan Atlanta, located in the Druid Hills section of unincorporated DeKalb County, Georgia, United States. The university was founded as Emory College in 1836 in Oxford, Georgia by a small group of Methodists and was named in honor of...
. 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: the Sue Kaufman Prize for First FictionSue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction
The Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction is awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The $5,000 prize is given for the best published first novel or collection of short stories in the preceding year...
from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a PEN/Hemingway Award citation.
It was followed by Dream Boy
Dream Boy
Dream Boy is a 1995 novel by Jim Grimsley.-Plot summary:Nathan is an intelligent but shy, adolescent boy, who wants to escape from his abusive and violent father and fantasizes about a relationship with Roy, the boy who lives next door. Roy is a senior at the same high school as Nathan, and he...
which received the American Library Association's Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Book Award for Literature (Stonewall Book Award
Stonewall Book Award
Sponsored by the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Round Table of the American Library Association , the Stonewall Book Award is for LGBT books...
), and My Drowning, which won the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Writers' Award. Subsequently he wrote the high fantasy
High fantasy
High fantasy or epic fantasy is a subgenre of fantasy that is set in invented or parallel worlds. High fantasy was brought to fruition through the work of authors such as J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, whose major fantasy works were published in the 1950s...
novel Kirith Kirin, which won the Lambda Literary Award
Lambda Literary Award
Lambda Literary Awards are awarded yearly by the US-based Lambda Literary Foundation to published works which celebrate or explore LGBT themes. Categories include Humor, Romance and Biography. To qualify, a book must have been published in the United States in the year current to the 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 Mr. Universe and Other Plays.