Release date: April 8, 2005
Contact: Deb Hammacher, Associate Director, University Media Relations,
at 404-727-0644 or deb.hammacher@emory.edu

Emory Author Jim Grimsley to Receive Award from American Academy of Arts and Letters

Emory University's Jim Grimsley is one of eight authors to receive the 2005 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is among 18 writers who will receive literature awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters that recognize "writers of exceptional accomplishment in any genre." The awards will be presented in New York May 18 at the academy's annual Ceremonial.

The literature prizes, totaling nearly $160,000, honor established and emerging writers of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Additional recipients of the $7,500 Academy Award in Literature are Joseph Harrison, Edward P. Jones, Donald Margulies, Charles Martin, Jeffrey Meyers, Stephen Orgel and Burton Watson.

Grimsley, born in Rocky Mount, N.C., in 1955, is an award-winning playwright and novelist. He is senior writer-in-residence and director of the creative writing program at Emory. His first novel, "Winter Birds" (Algonquin 1994), won the 1995 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and received a special citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation. His second novel, "Dream Boy" (Algonquin 1995), won the American Library Association GLBT Award for Literature and was a Lambda finalist. His third novel, "My Drowning" (Algonquin 1997), earned Grimsley Georgia Author of the Year honors. Additional novels include "Comfort & Joy" (Algonquin 1999); a fantasy novel, "Kirith Kirin" (Meisha Merlin Books 2000), that won the Lambda in the science fiction/ horror/fantasy category; and "Boulevard" (Algonquin 2002), a finalist for the Lambda in men's fiction.

His short stories and essays have appeared in Double Take, New Orleans Review, Carolina Quarterly, The Ontario Review and Asimov's, and his short fiction has been anthologized in The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 16, Men on Men 4, Men on Men 2000, and Best Stories From the South (2001).

Grimsley, a resident of Decatur, Ga. (30030), is playwright-in-residence at About Face Theatre in Chicago under a National Theatre Artist Residency Program grant from Theatre Communications Group/Pew Charitable Trust; he has been playwright in residence at 7Stages Theatre in Atlanta since 1986. He received the 1987 George Oppenheimer/Newsday Award for Best New American Playwright for "Mr. Universe." His collection of plays, "Mr. Universe and Other Plays" (Algonquin 1998), was a Lambda finalist for drama. Grimsley received the Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Writers Award in 1997.

The academy's 250 members nominate candidates, and a rotating committee of writers selects the winners. This year's committee members are Paula Fox, John Hollander, Romulus Linney, Reynolds Price, William Jay Smith and Edmund White. Anthony Hecht served on the committee until his death in October 2004.

The Academy of Arts and Letters was founded in 1898 to "foster, assist and sustain an interest in literature, music and the fine arts." Each year the academy honors more than 50 artists, architects, writers and composers (who are not members) with cash awards. The amounts of these prizes range from $2,500 to $75,000. Other activities of the academy are exhibitions of art, architecture and manuscripts; publications on the academy's history and events; and readings and performances of new musicals.

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