University Communications
Emory University
Atlanta, GA 30322

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Contact: Deb Hammacher, Assistant Director, 404-727-0644, or dhammac@emory.edu

AUTHORS GRIMSLEY AND SKIBELL JOIN THE FACULTY OF EMORY'S CREATIVE WRITING PROGRAM

Award-winning fiction writers and playwrights Jim Grimsley and Joseph Skibell have joined the faculty of Emory University's Creative Writing Program. Their addition to the faculty will boost the popular program's offerings in contemporary fiction, playwriting and screenwriting.

"We were extremely fortunate in our national search for faculty last year," says Lynna Williams, director of the program and associate professor of English/creative writing. "Skibell and Grimsley are exactly the caliber of faculty we were seeking. Their talent and experience will be an invaluable addition to the program."

Jim Grimsley is the author of the novels My Drowning, Dream Boy, Comfort and Joy and Winter Birds.

He has published a collection of plays, Mr. Universe & Other Plays, and his work has appeared in numerous anthologies, journals and magazines. Grimsley currently is working on a new play and novel. He is well-known to Atlanta theater audiences as playwright-in-residence at 7 Stages Theater where the stage adaptation of his novel Dream Boy was produced last summer. He has had 19 plays and adaptations staged around the United States since 1983.

Among Grimsley's many awards include the 1997 Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Writers Award, a 1995 PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award citation for first fiction for Winter Birds, and the 1998 Georgia Author of the Year for Fiction award for My Drowning. He is a frequent speaker on playwriting and on Southern fiction.

oseph Skibell is the author of the award-winning novel A Blessing on the Moon as well as short stories, articles and essays, eight plays and three screenplays. For A Blessing on the Moon Skibell was the recipient of the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Steven Turner Prize for First Fiction from Texas Institute of Letters, and a Publishers Weekly Notable Book and Amazon.com Top Ten Literature and Fiction Books of the Year award for 1997.

Skibell has written and spoken frequently on the topic of the Holocaust in fiction including speaking on "Holocaust: What to tell the Next Generation," with Deborah Lipstadt, director of the Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory, at the United Jewish Appeal Young Leadership Cabinet in Washington, D.C. (March 1998). He is completing a novel, Every Heart a Refugee, a short story collection, You're Nobody 'Til Everybody Knows You're Nobody, and a play, Jakob Cohen and the Malach HaShem. Both authors will teach playwriting and

Skibell also will teach screenwriting.

"Having these writers join the Emory faculty will have a huge impact on The Playwriting Center of Theater Emory," says Vincent Murphy, producing artistic director of Theater Emory. "When you consider Grimsley and Skibell here, in combination with Frank Manley and Steve Murray as playwrights-in-residence, and the activities of the Southeast Playwrights' Project that are supported by Emory, there is no institution in the Southeast that is as strong in both resident and guest writers."

Grimsley has been considered the best playwriting teacher in town for years through his work with the Southeast Playwrights' Project, according to Murphy. Coincidentally, a former collaborator of Theater Emory, Jenny Langsam with Actor's Shakespeare Company in New York, is working on a stage adaptation of Skibell's novel, A Blessing on the Moon. "Both authors fit in well with Theater Emory's tradition of literary adaptation including Beckett and Manley," says Murphy. Theater Emory will present readings from both of the authors' works in January to celebrate their joining the faculty.

Emory's Creative Writing Program has been popular with students since its inception in 1990. Although the program sends several students each year to graduate writing programs, the overall goal is not to train professional writers, but to contribute to the quality of students' liberal arts education. "Creative writing workshops change the relationship of our students to literature," says Williams. "Through reading as writers read, students begin to understand not only the elements of fiction, but how those elements can be used. For example, students learn that any narrative choice, even those made by Tolstoy or Fitzgerald, also is available to them."

One of the strengths of the program is its award-winning faculty, with each member well-grounded and successful in his or her respective genre. In addition to Skibell and Grimsley, Williams has published short fiction and creative non-fiction. Xuefei Jin is a novelist and short fiction writer under the pen name Ha Jin, and Frank Manley is a playwright, short story writer and novelist.

The Creative Writing Program sponsors a reading series each year that brings in nationally acclaimed authors representing various genres for public readings and discussions of their work. This year's schedule of authors includes short story writers and novelists Charles Baxter, Fredereick Busch and Allegra Goodman and poet Adrienne Rich. Baxter will be at Emory on Thursday, Sept. 30 for a 2:30 p.m. colloquium and 8:15 p.m. public reading and book signing on campus. For further information on any of the author appearances, call the Creative Writing Program office at 404-727-4683.

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