Greg Downs (writer)
Greg Downs (born November 22, 1971) is the author of the Flannery O'Connor Award-winning short story collection, Spit Baths, published in 2006 by the University of Georgia Press and of the history book Declarations of Dependence published in 2011 by the University of North Carolina Press. Spit Baths has been called "masterful" and "rich and mesmerizing" by the Philadelphia Inquirer; a "founding myth for a racially integrated South" by the San Francisco Chronicle; and a "luminous new collection" by Small Spiral Notebook. Downs' stories have been published in literary magazines like the Black Warrior Review, Glimmer Train, Meridian, The Greensboro Review, Chicago Reader, CutBank, The South Dakota Review, The Southeast Review, The Literary Review, Wind, storySouth, Philadelphia Stories, Sycamore Review, New Letters, Madison Review, and Witness. He graduated from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, which awarded him a James Michener/Copernicus Society of America fellowship.
Downs, born in San Francisco, was raised in his mother's native Elizabethtown and Hyden, Kentucky; Nashville; and Kapaa, Kauai, Hawaii. His writing has been called "thoroughly original and completely authentic" by fellow Kentucky native Fenton Johnson. He is the grandson of noted virologist and naturalist Wilbur G. Downs. He is a B.A. graduate of Yale University, where his advisor was Bancroft Prize-winning historian Melvin Patrick Ely.
Along with his fiction writing, Downs is also an historian, with a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where his dissertation supervisor was Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Steven Hahn. He studies 19th-century American political culture, and is an Assistant Professor at the City College of New York. Declarations of Dependence was called "brilliant, imaginative, and deeply researched" by historian Scott Nelson, a "rare achievement" by historian Laura Edwards, and a "carefully crafted and deeply researched study" by Civil War historian James M. McPherson.
References
University of Georgia Press page on Spit Baths
San Francisco Chronicle review
Lexington Herald-Leader review
Feature in Elizabethtown News-Enterprise
Profile in Philadelphia Weekly
Book Notes in Largehearted Boy
Review in Small Spiral Notebook
Review in Philadelphia Magazine
UNC Press website for Declarations of Dependence
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