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“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.
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“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.