Curtis Dawkins grew up in rural Illinois and earned an MFA in fiction writing at Western Michigan University. He has struggled with alcohol and substance abuse through most of his life and, during a botched home robbery, killed a man on Halloween 2004. Since late 2005, he's served a life sentence with no possibility of parole in various prisons throughout Michigan. He has three children with his partner, Kim, who is a writing professor living in Portland, Oregon. The Graybar Hotel is his first book.
"Reading The Graybar Hotel is as close as most people would ever
want to get to going to prison. Dawkins's characters are as
indelible as the prison tattoos he describes with wry precision,
from Depakote Mo to Doo-Wop to Jonnie Mae. The clichés about prison
life--cigarettes as currency, strained race relations, a lot of
television watching, and occasional violence--are deftly skirted
here as Dawkins plays with the claustrophobia of his characters'
condition by moving in and out of their lives before and during
incarceration. Dawkins, who is serving life without parole for
murder, is a formidable new talent."
--LitHub
"Dawkins can write. His prose skillfully carries the reader
directly into the setting of all of his stories: the jailhouse or
prison. He captures this unnatural and uniquely terrible world with
precision and clarity. Most readers haven't spent time
incarcerated; all will come away from this superb collection
feeling as if they have."
--New York Journal of Books
"The Graybar Hotel by Curtis Dawkins: the best book of short
stories by an MFA grad imprisoned for life you'll read this
year--or probably ever."
--New York Magazine
"[A] book that is remarkable for its modesty, realism and humanity
... Dawkins has a genius for bringing characters to life and making
mundane situations compelling, if only because they feel so real
... [Dawkins] has produced a book that is not only moving and
genuine, but genuinely important; one that, without resorting to
shock tactics, powerfully conveys the perverse inhumanity of mass
incarceration."
--The Guardian
"Dawkins brings us real news and art, employing strange
conceits--inmates collect-calling strangers, or preparing for an
intramural softball game, or acquiring the ability to disappear--to
expose prison's most powerful weapon against minds and bodies: not
violence, but boredom."
--Vulture
"[A] powerful collection of stories about how inmates survive and
struggle in prison."
--San Diego Magazine
"[Dawkins's] prison stories are insightful and well written, and
they ring true. Dawkins possesses the acquired wisdom of a man
who's been there, done that and, unfortunately, is staying
there."
--Houston Chronicle
"A well-turned and surprising addition to prison literature."
--Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"A Western Michigan University MFA graduate serving life for a
drug-fueled 2005 Kalamazoo murder, Dawkins chronicles the
occasionally colorful, often despondent and mostly tedious lives of
contemporary inmates ... Dawkins writes empathetic, thoughtful
pieces about those who long for the outside."
--Shelf Awareness
"Almost every one of the 14 short stories in the collection seems
to have originated from something Dawkins experienced or witnessed
in jail or prison, and almost every one reflects with devastating
compassion on the guilt and regrets of the criminals inside ...
[The Graybar Hotel is] well-written and worth reading for Dawkins'
craft and insight, but it's also an occasion to consider an
industry that has little to do with rehabilitation, and that makes
it nearly impossible for its participants to recuperate their
lives."
--Chicago Tribune
"Dawkins is a wickedly skilled storyteller . . . Despite its
subject matter, The Graybar Hotel is ultimately uplifting . . .
toughly courageous, unflinching, and unapologetic."
--O, the Oprah Magazine
"Dawkins's tales impress with the authenticity of real-life
experience, and his prose is rich in metaphor and imagery ... His
often wryly amusing observations about the routines of prison life
make him a striking guide for navigating the terrain."
--Publishers Weekly
"In The Graybar Hotel, Curtis Dawkins brings the contemporary short
story at its best into the shadowy world of America at its worst,
behind the bars of its overpopulated and ubiquitous prisons. These
brilliantly crafted stories - with their formal inventiveness,
savory dialogue, meticulous detail, and succinctly compassionate
portraiture - are as much a manual in how to write original short
fiction as in how to think about prisons. Still, anyone who wants
to understand America's correctional system through the clarifying
lens of great fiction will now have to know three indispensable
books: Malcolm Braly's On the Yard, for the social novel; Chester
Himes' Yesterday Will Make You Cry, for the bildungsroman; and now
Curtis Dawkins' The Graybar Hotel, for the short story."
--Jaimy Gordon, author of the National Book Award-winning novel
Lord of Misrule
"In stories that range from high-definition realism to wistful
surrealism, Dawkins illuminates the nuances of prison life from the
fragility of inmate friendships to the constant assault of memories
and regrets, sensual deprivation, the intricate web of lies and
power plays, and the many shades of stoicism. Sorrowful,
hard-hitting, and compassionate, these finely formed, quietly
devastating stories are told with unusual and magnetizing
authority."
--Booklist, starred review
"This short story collection explores the life of prisoners with
both intoxicating and unparalleled insight and surprising
humor."
--Time Out
"What's freshest and most surprising here is Dawkins's absolute
focus on the humanity of those behind bars--of how inmates survive,
or don't, as they struggle to maintain self and sanity in the face
of the tedium, deprivation, and loneliness of incarceration. A
fully realized debut."
--Library Journal, starred review
"The stories in The Graybar Hotel are astonishing, clever and true.
It's the best collection I've read in a long, long time."
--Roddy Doyle, author of The Barrytown Trilogy and the Booker
Prize-winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
"The Graybar Hotel is unlike any other short story collection I've
ever read. Dawkins' cast of characters are forever longing for
escape--escape from prison, escape from their past, escape from
freedom, even. And when the escape is successful, when one reality
is traded for another, Dawkins' characters find themselves lost,
even pining for what they had in the first place. The Graybar Hotel
is not a "prison-book." It is a mirror, held up to our culture of
incarceration. It is a testament, a testimony that the people
inside prison are as much Americans, as much citizens as their
guards, parole officers, and wardens, that there is no outside,
that prisons are as much America as pubs, playgrounds, or parks.
There is a current of electricity running through this book, a
shocking voltage of truth. What an authentic and rare book The
Graybar Hotel is."
--Nickolas Butler, internationally bestselling author of Shotgun
Lovesongs, Beneath the Bonfire, and The Hearts of Men
"Curtis Dawkins draws from his direct experience to paint a picture
of jailhouse life in all its grimness. He conveys the repulsive
mixture of boredom, stupidity, filthiness, meanness and chronic
anxiety that is the prisoner's lot. The inmates are dysfunctional,
the structure that houses them authoritarian. This book will scare
you straight--or should. But within their cages, Dawkins' prisoners
dream--of criminal schemes, drugs, women--and an American world
outside the walls. Their avid fantasies burn with a furious light
against the bleak institutional background, exploding with
ingenuity, pathos and rebellion. In many cases, these outsiders
are, like Dawkins himself, artists.
--Atticus Lish, author of Preparation for the Next Life
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