The New Yorker praised its “unwavering, unsentimental love.” Grimsley was suddenly hailed as one of Atlanta’s - of the South’s - literary celebrities. When it was finally published in English two years later, it won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a PEN/Hemingway Award citation. Grimsley took up residence in Corley’s living room to write his first novel, the semi-autobiographical “Winter Birds.” American publishers rejected it for about 10 years as “too dark,” until a German edition in 1992 created a buzz. All of these plays were signature Grimsley - serious, addressing issues from religious hypocrisy and patriarchy to domestic violence to homophobia, gay porn and nuclear proliferation - and wickedly funny, bursting with life, powerful and unafraid.” “I don’t think there is an actor alive who wouldn’t leap at the chance to embody a Grimsley character.
“Grimsley became an extraordinary playwright of astonishing range, matching that of his novels - some satirical, some fantastical, all lyrical,” says impresario Elisabeth Lewis Corley, who has produced and acted in several. “It was just about to take off,” he says, so he moved here in 1981 and began furiously writing plays for 7Stages Theatre.
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His head buzzing with words and dreams, Grimsley moved to New Orleans, where he lived for a while “just learning how to be gay.” College friends, though, were settling in Atlanta and launching a vibrant theater scene. He came out to friends at 20, to family at 25. At Chapel Hill, I realized that literature can change the world.” “It suddenly was not a childish amusement.
“That is where I really developed my love for language,” he says. His was the generation that finally integrated public schools, and Grimsley writes exquisitely and frankly about his dawning social awareness in his 2015 memoir, “How I Shed My Skin: Unlearning the Racist Lessons of a Southern Childhood.” Just as he was reckoning with bold, new Black classmates, he was becoming aware of his own “otherness” as gay.Īt the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he went to work for the student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, and started to find a voice. He was an imaginative boy, escaping into science fiction and fantasy, and trying to emulate those stories in his own notebooks. “For us in the South,” he has written, “the family is a field where craziness grows like weeds.” Strange plants that offer fodder for art, he soon realized. His father, who worked in refrigeration and air conditioning, was a “violent alcoholic,” he says, and his mother owned and managed a cemetery. Grimsley was born in rural Grifton, North Carolina. Before I met him, I read his books with the sense that the knowledge therein was making me more free.” “His work holds a particular place in Southern and queer literature,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jericho Brown. Grimsley has been blazing trails with snappy rainbow flags throughout a prolific career in which he’s produced 13 books in different genres and 30 plays, with work collected in more than 20 anthologies - racking up Stonewall and Lambda literary prizes along the way. “But 20 years later, his writing is even more emotionally open, and he’s allowed himself the risk of optimism and clarity.” “Jim’s ‘Dream Boy’ won him a passionate following for providing some of these very things,” Levine continues. “As someone who grew up gay in the 1970s, I cannot express what it would have meant to me to have a book like this, a book with a gay protagonist who is so true, real and vulnerable a plot that gives readers a transporting, exceptionally sexy romance and an ending that offers genuine hope. His editor, Arthur Levine, echoes those sentiments. It was in high school that I needed to read about relationships between boys.” I searched out books like John Rechy’s ‘City of Night’ and Gore Vidal’s ‘The City and the Pillar’ in my 20s, and they were amazing. Then I read James Baldwin and was swept away by it. “The Mary Renault books that I read were a big help. “A book like this one would have made life much easier when I was a teenager,” he says. With it, Grimsley has written the kind of book that might have eased his fraught coming-of-age as a gay man from the rural South. No spoilers, but suffice it to say “Dove” has a happy ending, for a change. One function of creating your own world in a novel is that you can save yourself.
“It’s written for the YA market, but I hope older readers of all backgrounds will respond to the storytelling and recognize those heady feelings of first love,” Grimsley says in a phone interview from his home in Goldsboro, North Carolina.