Author Jim Grimsley presents “How I Shed My Skin: Unlearning the Racist Lessons of a Southern Childhood,” March 11

PRESS RELEASE:

Jim Grimsley is an award-winning novelist whose memoir, How I Shed My Skin: Unlearning the Racist Lessons of a Southern Childhood, is out in paperback. Jim has a signing at Malaprop’s on Friday, March 11, at 7 p.m.

In How I Shed My Skin: Unlearning the Racist Lessons of a Southern Childhood, Jim Grimsley chronicles his own coming of age in a time of turbulent, albeit necessary, growing pains for our country. He was an eleven-year-old boy in a small eastern North Carolina when federally mandated integration of schools went into effect in the U.S. in 1966. At the time, his family was reluctant to send their son to a mixed-race classroom, but could not afford the still-segregated private schools.

Grimsley looks back at that school and those times, remembering his own first real encounters with black children and their culture. The result is a deeply moving narrative, and an honest discussion of racism and its roots. Jim takes readers into those classrooms and onto the playing fields as alliances were forged, friendships established, and prejudices slowly dismantled. Looking back from today’s perspective, he examines how far we’ve come, and what problems persist.

Jim Grimsley is the author of four previous novels, among them Winter Birds, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award; Dream Boy, winner of the GLBTF Book Award for literature; My Drowning, a Lila-Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award winner; and Comfort and Joy. He lives in Atlanta and teaches at Emory University.