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 Booker Prize-winning PADDY CLARKE HA HA HA Rarely have I read a book that takes you so vividly into a hinterland at once hellish and humane, brutal and tender. A literary testament to the indomitability of the human spirit and the primacy of the creative act -- John Niven, author of STRAIGHT WHITE MALE The voice of a man who understands, deeply and instinctively, that, at root, the narrative art is a yearning for contact and, in these stories, what a hilarious, moving, heartbreaking, absurd, and ultimately affirmative endeavour that is proven to be. Stunning -- Niall Griffiths, author of GRITS Unlike any other short story collection I've ever read. The Graybar Hotel is not a 'prison-book.' It is a mirror, held up to our culture of incarceration ... 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 Curtis Dawkins writes, "Once you become a number, all you are is the words you use. If your words aren't real, then neither are you." It's a serious, demanding standard that Dawkins sets for his writing ... The words and the writer are real indeed, as is the unforgettable experience of reading this book -- Stuart Dybek, author of I SAILED WITH MAGELLAN 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 -- Jaimy Gordon, author of the National Book Award-winning novel LORD OF MISRULE

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.