Release date: June 16, 2003
Contact: Deb Hammacher, Associate Director, University Media Relations,
at 404-727-0644 or dhammac@emory.edu

Jim Grimsley Given Georgia Author of the Year Award

Jim Grimsley, senior resident fellow and director of Emory University's Creative Writing Program, has been named Georgia Author of the Year for fiction for the second time. He is recognized for his most recent novel, "Boulevard" (Algonquin Books, 2002). Grimsley was first named Georgia Author of the Year in fiction for his 1997 novel, "My Drowning" (Algonquin).

The Georgia Author of the Year Award, given by the Georgia Writers Association, is intended to recognize Georgia's outstanding writers and make their work known to the public. The 39th annual awards were presented at a June 7 ceremony at the Robert Ferst Center for the Arts.

Any Georgia resident author who had a book published in 2002 was eligible to be nominated for a Georgia Author of the Year Award. Authors who self-published books as well as those with titles released by traditional publishers also were eligible. The complete list of winners can be found at www.georgiawriters.org/39thWinners.htm.

Grimsley is an award-winning novelist and playwright who has been on Emory's creative writing faculty full-time since 1999 and prior to that as an adjunct member since1995. 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," won the American Library Association GLBT Award for Literature and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. "My Drowning" and "Comfort & Joy" (Algonquin,1999) are his third and fourth novels. A fantasy novel, "Kirith Kirin" (Meisha Merlin Books, 2000) received the Lambda for science fiction and horror. 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."

He is playwright-in-residence at About Face Theatre in Chicago and has been playwright-in-residence at 7 Stages Theatre in Atlanta since 1986. In 1987 he received the 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.

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