JIM GRIMSLEY
Jim Grimsley was born in 1955 in rural eastern North Carolina and was educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
He is the author of several critically-acclaimed plays, including The Existentialists (ACME, 1983), The Earthlings (7Stages, 1984), and Mr. Universe (7Stages, 1987).
Grimsley’s first novel Winter Birds won the Sue Kaufman Prize for best first novel from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. He has subsequently published eight novels including Dream Boy, winner of the American Library Association’s Gay/Lesbian Literary Award and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award; My Drowning, for which he was named Georgia Author of the Year; Comfort & Joy, another Lambda finalist; and Boulevard, a Lambda finalist in the men’s literature category. His most recent book is How I Shed My Skin, a memoir about the years of school desegregation in North Carolina, marking his return to Algonquin Books in 2015.