Downs, Greg

PERSONAL: Married; wife’s name Diane (an associate dean). Education: Yale University, B.A., 1993; University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, M.F.A., 1999; Northwestern University, M.A., 2003; University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D., 2006.

ADDRESSES: Home— New York, NY. Office— Department of History, City College of New York, 138th St. and Convent Ave., New York, NY 10031. E-mail— [email protected].

CAREER: Writer and educator. City College of the City University of New York, assistant professor of history, 2006—. University School of Nashville, Nashville, TN, former varsity basketball coach. Worked as a newspaper editor, a reporter, and a high-school English teacher.

AWARDS, HONORS: Flannery O’Connor Award, for Spit Baths; James Michener/Copernicus Society of America Prize, Iowa Writer’s Workshop; Josephine DeKarman Fellowship.

WRITINGS

Spit Baths (short stories), University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 2006.

Contributor of short stories to periodicals, including Glimmer Train, Greensboro Review, Black Warrior Review, Meridian, CutBank, South Dakota Review, Chicago Reader, Southeast Review, Literary Review, StorySouth, Wind, Philadelphia Stories, New Letters, Madison Review, Witness, and Sycamore Review.

SIDELIGHTS: Greg Downs’s debut short-story collection Spit Baths“offers a multifaceted and exquisite rendering of the modern (and postmodern) south, the stories’ realism and detail no less effective for their imaginative, poetic depictions,” observed reviewer Scott Yarbrough on StorySouth.com.“Living in a place where the present blurs into the past, Downs’ characters are often childlike adults or precocious children who display an innocence bordering on ignorance, until a moment of sudden and bitter epiphany,” commented a contributor to SmallSpiral Notebook.com. In the two-page short “Adam’s Curse,” which a Kirkus Reviews writer noted “demonstrates nicely the strange beauty of Downs’s imagination,” the nineteen-year-old protagonist watches with bemusement as his female relatives decide that they can and will live their lives without men. Meanwhile, the narrator is keenly aware of the female charms of the cheerful checkout girl at the grocery store. In “Snack Cakes,” a high-school boy is kicked out by his mother when she catches him having sex with his girlfriend. He seeks help from his grandfather, a man married six times and unsure which ex-wife he loves the best, and who has just been kicked out by wife number six. Together, grandfather and grandson consider the mysteries of women as the two visit each of the six ex-wives, dropping off boxes of the grandfather’s keepsakes and mementoes for each. “Field Trip” examines the place where a young man’s sexual fantasies and daydreams coincide with a school trip. The protagonist of “Ain’t I a King, Too?” leaves behind some domestic strife in 1935 Kentucky. When he arrives in Shreveport, Louisiana, however, he is mistaken for recently killed Huey Long, the state’s controversial, corrupt, firebrand senator. What follows is a case of mistaken identity with its own peculiar dangers. Downs’s “work has a cerebral, surreal element that requires a little piecing together,” remarked a Kirkus Reviews critic. Joey Rubin, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, felt that Downs “speaks elegantly of those ugly histories, namely of racism and hatred, that we’d rather forget, and paints a hopeful portrait of the role family can play in healing those wounds.” A Publishers Weekly contributor noted that in his writing, Downs displays a “strong sense of style and unfaltering command of his material” allowing him to “take the kinds of risks in tone and subject” that will cause readers to either love or hate the collection.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES

PERIODICALS

Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 2006, review of Spit Baths, p. 690.

Philadelphia Inquirer, January 21, 2007, Martha Woodall, “Realizing the Past Can Never Be Escaped.”

Publishers Weekly, August 7, 2006, review of Spit Baths, p. 34.

San Francisco Chronicle, December 14, 2006, Joey Rubin, review of Spit Baths, p. F1.

ONLINE

City University of New York Department of History Web site, http://www.ccny/cuny.edu/ (December 20, 2006), biography of Greg Downs.

Greg Downs Home Page, http://www.gregdowns.net (December 20, 2006).

GregDownsMySpace.com, http://www.myspace.com/ (December 20, 2006), profile of Greg Downs.

Litpark.com, http://www.litpark.com/ (October 28, 2006), Susan Henderson, interview with Greg Downs.

My.Tennessean.com, http://my.tennessean.com/ (November 17, 2006), Angela Patterson, “Greg Downs: USN Grad Awash in Southern Culture in Spit Baths.”

SmallSpiralNotebook.com, http://www.smallspiralnotebook.com/ (November 16, 2006), Brendan Hughes, review of Spit Baths.

StorySouth.com, http://www.storysouth.com/ (August, 2006), biography of Greg Downs; (November, 2006), Scott Yarbrough, review of Spit Baths.