Kirith Kirin (The City Behind the Stars) (91 page)

No one in that country doubts that this tale is anything but history, a record of the Long War, no more than they doubt the living King Kirith descended to the low road and crossed through Tornimul after an age of peace. As the years pass and we know more and more about the people and the past of Irion, we come closer to grasping the reality that this may be a true history, and that magic may be real, at least in one place we know. We have all seen reason to be glad for that.

Jedda Martele

Béyoton, Year Standard 32334

Jim Grimsley is a playwright and novelist who was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina in 1955. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Jim's first novel
Winter Birds
was published by Algonquin Books in the United States in 1994. The novel won the 1995 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Prix Charles Brisset, given by the French Academy of Physicians. The novel also received a special citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation as one of three finalists for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Jim's second novel,
Dream Boy
, was published by Algonquin in September, 1995, and won the 1996 Award for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Literature from the American Library Association; the novel was also one of five finalists for the Lambda Literary Award.
Dream Boy
was adapted for the stage by Eric Rosen, the play premiering at About Face Theatre in Chicago in 1996. Jim’s third novel,
My Drowning
, was published in 1997 and for this book Jim was named Georgia Author of the Year. His fourth novel,
Comfort & Joy
was a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and his fifth novel,
Boulevard
, was published in April, 2002; for this novel he was named Georgia Author of the Year for the second time.

Jim has written eleven full-length and four one-act plays, including
Mr. Universe, The Lizard of Tarsus, White People
and
The Existentialists
. A collection of his plays,
Mr. Universe and Other Plays
, was published by Algonquin in 1998, and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist in drama. He has been playwright-in-residence at 7Stages Theatre of Atlanta since 1986 and was playwright in residence at About Face Theatre of Chicago from 2000-2004. In 1988 he was awarded the George Oppenheimer Award for Best New American Playwright for his play
Mr. Universe
. He was also awarded the first-ever Bryan Prize for Drama, presented by the Fellowship of Southern Writers for distinguished achievement in playwriting,in 1993.

He was a 1997 winner of the Lila Wallace/Reader’s Digest Writers Award. His first fantasy novel,
Kirith Kirin
, was published by Meisha Merlin Press in June, 2000 and won the Lambda Literary Award in the Science Fiction/Horror category. He has since published two subsequent science fiction novels set in the same universe,
The Ordinary
and
The Last Green Tree
, both with Tor Books of NY.
The Ordinary
was awarded a Lammy in 2005. His short fiction has been anthologized in
The Year’s Best Science Fiction
: Sixteenth and Nineteenth Annual Collections, edited by Gardner Dozois, in
Best New Stories from the South
, 2001 edition, edited by Shannon Ravenel, and in other anthologies. He is a member of PEN, Dramatists Guild, Alternate ROOTS, and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. He has twice been a finalist for the Rome Prize in Literature. In 2005, he won an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his work as a playwright and novelist. In 2006 he, along with Dorothy Allison, was one of the inaugural winners of the Mid-Career Author’s Award from the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival.

Jim is currently Senior Resident Fellow in Creative Writing and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta.

Ducktown Press, a division of South Pole Entertainment, LLC, was created to publish e-books and audio-books initially for the Amazon Kindle store and the Apple iBook store. Availability through Kindle's readers makes our books available on multiple hardwares including the Kindle pad, PCs, Macs,the Blackberry, the Android, and the iPad/iPhone/iPod. The Apple iBook store makes ePub book formats available on the iPad/iPhone/iPod. We will add other platforms as appropriate. If you wish to be notified of new books and platforms as we release them, you may sign up for email notifications at our website where you may also leave comments about this book. Our website is at
www.DucktownPress.com
.

South Pole Entertainment was created to develop single-player and massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG). Our first will be
The Wizard's Tower
, based on the magic in
Kirith Kirin
. We expect to have it out in 2013. If you wish to be kept informed of its progress you may sign up for email updates at our website
www.SouthPoleEntertainment.com
.