Curtis Dawkins
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 robbery, killed a man on Halloween 2004. Since late 2005, he’s been serving 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 grity, gripping and grimly comic stories in The Graybar Hotel give form and content to inmates lives that, on the surface, are defined by loneliness, boredom, violence and alienation.’
Chris Moss
The Telegraph Men
Curtis Dawkins wrote his remarkable and profound short story collection The Graybar Hotel in prison in Michigan, where he is serving life with no possibility of parole. The money he has made from the book was going into a fund for his three children. Now the state is suing him for that money, to make him pay for his incarceration.
New York Times