Jim Grimsley

Jim Grimsley (born September 21, 1955) is an American novelist and playwright.

Biography Born to a rural family in Grifton, North Carolina, 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. 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 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) in 1996, and My Drowning, which won the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award.

His 1999 book, Comfort & Joy, was a finalist for the 2000 Stonewall Book Award for Literature.

In 2015, Grimlsey published a memoir entitled How I Shed My Skin: Unlearning the Racist Lessons of a Southern Childhood.

He has also worked on module for the Neverwinter Nights video game called Citadel that won a golden dragon award for best module and a Hall of Fame Award.