Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Graybar Hotel
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http://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Curtis-Dawkins/2119547543 * http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/sc-graybar-hotel-curtis-dawkins-books-0726-20170710-story.html
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LC control no.: n 2017032201
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2017032201
HEADING: Dawkins, Curtis
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053 _0 |a PS3604.A97833
100 1_ |a Dawkins, Curtis
670 __ |a The Graybar Hotel, 2017: |b ECIP t.p. (Curtis Dawkins)
670 __ |a Amazon website, viewed June 3, 2017 |b (Graybar Hotel: about the author, 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 home robbery, killed a man on Halloween 2004. Since late 2005, he’s served a life sentence with no possibility of parole in various prisons throughout Michigan)
PERSONAL
Partner of Kim Knutsen (a writing professor); children: Henry (stepson), Elijah, Lily Rose.
EDUCATION:Western Michigan University, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Curtis Dawkins is the author of the debut collection The Graybar Hotel: Stories, a series of tales set in an American prison. The collection attracted notice not only because of its unusual setting (very little American literature takes place in prisons), but also because Dawkins himself is a prisoner: he was convicted of murdering a man in Kalamazoo, Michigan on Halloween night in 2004.
At the time he committed the murder, Dawkins was already a writer–he had earned an M.B.A. from Western Michigan University—but he also had a long history of drug abuse, “Mr. Dawkins grew up in Louisville, Ill.,” explained Alexandra Alter in the New York Times, “where his family ran a grocery store and meatpacking plant. He started drinking when he was twelve, a habit that worsened in his 20s, leading him to drop out of college. In 1991, he went to an addiction treatment center and began attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. He eventually got sober and took a job in his father’s meatpacking business. When a man he met at A.A. gave Mr. Dawkins books by Faulkner and Salinger, he fell in love with fiction and went back to school to study English at Southern Illinois University.” “The night he killed Thomas Bowman, 48, a house painter who lived in Kalamazoo near the college campus,” Alter continued, “Mr. Dawkins went first to see Ms. Knutsen and the children. They had dinner together, and he watched a baseball game on TV with Henry, who was ten. He said he was going home to watch a movie and would call Ms. Knutsen later. It was Saturday, Oct. 30, and he planned to come back the next night to hand out candy while Ms. Knutsen went trick-or-treating with Henry; Lily Rose, 4; and Elijah, who was almost 6.”
After he left his wife’s house Dawkins smoked crack cocaine, put on a Halloween gangster costume, and shot Thomas Bowman in the head. The action appeared to put an end to Dawkins’ career, but instead Dawkins worked his long incarceration into his art. “He had already earned his MFA by the time he committed the murder. He was married and had three young children. Supposedly, everything was going well for him, but then he snapped,” declared Charles R. Larson in Counterpunch. “This is the sad story of more lives being lost to addiction, both the victim and the murderer and the families of both. Still, it’s difficult to read The Graybar Hotel and ignore all the background relating to the author. If you read the book, you will have to ask yourself the same questions I asked.” “Dawkins … has said the practice of writing allows him to exist in an imaginary world,” wrote Edward Helmore in the London Guardian. “Writing about a fictional prison eases the burden of being in a real one. “It gets me away from the world I’m trying to turn into fiction, if that makes any sense,” he told the Detroit News.“
Based on Dawkins’s stories in The Graybar Hotel, however, prison is at its heart extremely boring. “There’s no trace of the grand guignol sadism and preoccupation with sexual violence that typify popular prison narratives, from Oz to Prisoner Cell Block H,” stated Sandra Newman in the London Guardian. “Instead, Dawkins gives us prison as it is for most inmates most of the time: a series of dull, claustrophobic days, in which men oppress each other not with violence, but tedium. His characters play dominoes, tell interminable stories, sell handmade Christmas cards to each other, obsessively watch sports.” “The true defining element of prison life is tedium,” explained a Kirkus Reviews contributor: “too much time to watch TV, to call random numbers collect in hopes of a connection, to jury-rig tattoo guns.”
Many critics detect elements of magical realism in Dawkins’s stories. To others, it is a commentary on the nature of the prison system. The author, wrote a New Statesman reviewer, “gives voice to a group of people forgotten by society.” “The Graybar Hotel tells moving, human stories about men enduring impossible circumstances,” declared Poornima Apte in BookBrowse. “Dawkins takes readers beyond the cells into characters’ pasts and memories and desires, into the unusual bonds that form during incarceration and the strained relationships with family members on the outside.” Dawkins’s “often wryly amusing observations about the routines of prison life,” said a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “make him a striking guide for navigating the terrain.” “It’s hard to read “The Graybar Hotel” and not think about the prison crisis in America, with 2.3 million people behind bars, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, an advocacy group seeking reforms to address mass incarceration,” declared Kathleen Rooney in the Chicago Tribune. “That maybe is the biggest benefit of this book’s existence. It’s well-written and worth reading… [and] it’s also an occasion to consider an industry that has little to do with rehabilitation.” “Sorrowful, hard-hitting, and compassionate,” concluded Booklist reviewer Donna Seaman, “these finely formed, quietly devastating stories are told with unusual and magnetizing authority.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, June, 2017, Donna Seaman, review of The Graybar Hotel: Stories, p. 52.
Chicago Tribune, July 10, 2017, Kathleen Rooney, “Illinois Native — Convicted Murderer with Writing Degree — Pens Book from Prison.”
Guardian (London, England), September 8, 2017, Sandra Newman, review of The Graybar Hotel; February 19, 2018, Edward Helmore, ” Michigan Prisoner Turned Celebrated Author May Face Incarceration Bill.”
Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2017, review of The Graybar Hotel.
New Statesman, August 25, 2017, review of The Graybar Hotel, p. 39.
New York Times, July 2, 2017, Alexandra Alter, “An Addict, a Confessed Killer and Now a Debut Author.”
Publishers Weekly, May 29, 2017, review of The Graybar Hotel, p. 38.
ONLINE
BookBrowse, https://www.bookbrowse.com/ (April 11, 2018), Poornima Apte, review of The Graybar Hotel.
Counterpunch, https://www.counterpunch.org/ (August 11, 2017), Charles R. Larson, review of The Graybar Hotel.
Simon & Schuster Website, http://www.simonandschuster.com/ (April 11, 2018), author profile.
Print Marked Items
The Graybar Hotel
New Statesman.
146.5381 (Aug. 25, 2017): p39.
COPYRIGHT 2017 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
The Graybar Hotel
Curtis Dawkins
The Graybar Hotel is the debut short story collection from Curtis Dawkins, who since 2005 has been serving
a life sentence with no possibility of parole in various prisons around Michigan. In each of his stories, he
depicts the gritty reality of life caged up. Often unapologetic and always moving, Dawkins gives voice to a
group of people forgotten by society. His characters are driven by a deep-seated urgency to communicate
and a longing for freedom that can only ever be satisfied through self-expression. For many of them, facing
life, not death, is the greatest struggle. Canongate, 124pp. 14-99 [pounds sterling]
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Graybar Hotel." New Statesman, 25 Aug. 2017, p. 39. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A506036783/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=583bccb2.
Accessed 27 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A506036783
Dawkins, Curtis: THE GRAYBAR
HOTEL
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Dawkins, Curtis THE GRAYBAR HOTEL Scribner (Adult Fiction) $26.00 7, 4 ISBN: 978-1-5011-6229-9
Stories about the subtle indignities and wandering imaginations that shape prison life, written by an
inmate.Debut author Dawkins is an MFA graduate serving a life-without-parole term in a Michigan prison
for a 2004 murder. Whatever one makes of the circumstances behind his incarceration, he's unquestionably a
keen observer of the psychological tools inmates use to sustain themselves behind bars. "Every emotion is
multiplied," writes the narrator of "Sunshine," who suspects a cellmate's girlfriend lied about her cancer
diagnosis to dump him. "Your mind becomes a very clear prism, into which every feeling enters." To cope,
some play at mental illness ("Daytime Drama"), some obsess over their dreams ("The Boy Who Dreamed
Too Much"), and some--as in the especially supple "Engulfed"--become serial liars to the point that the
lying becomes a personality trait. And the narrator discovers there are consequences to challenging that
persona: "Once you become a number, all you are is the words you use. If your words aren't real, then
neither are you." Dawkins isn't much interested in the cliched tales of prison violence, overcrowding, sexual
assault, and drug abuse, though such themes occasionally surface. Nor does he dwell much on the reasons
for his protagonists' imprisonment--the narrator of "573543" was caught buying large amounts of ketamine,
but his chief flaw is ignorance. For Dawkins, the true defining element of prison life is tedium: too much
time to watch TV, to call random numbers collect in hopes of a connection, to jury-rig tattoo guns. And
time, above all, to indulge in reveries about life on the outside. Or, barring that, turn prison life strange, like
the prisoner who seems to have developed the capacity to make himself disappear. Magical realism?
Wishful thinking? Dawkins leave the answer purposefully, poignantly vague. A well-turned and surprising
addition to prison literature.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Dawkins, Curtis: THE GRAYBAR HOTEL." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491002971/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4a218f6d.
Accessed 27 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491002971
The Graybar Hotel
Donna Seaman
Booklist.
113.19-20 (June 2017): p52.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* The Graybar Hotel. By Curtis Dawkins. July 2017. 224p. Scribner, $26 (9781501162299).
The narrator in "County," the first story in Dawkins' staggering debut collection, calmly explains why he's
under suicide watch: "I had never been to jail, and I was going to be locked up for a long time." He
thoughtfully describes his surroundings, the wildly unpredictable behavior of his fellow inmates--which
veers from alarming to funny to comforting--and his reliance on television as a portal to a bright, lively, and
hopeful alternative world. Each subsequent tale of incarceration expands this theater of grim comedy,
repercussive tragedy, and warped adaptation. In "A Human Number," the imprisoned narrator makes collect
calls to strangers, hungry for the sounds of home. Improvised tattoos, baseball, and smoking are soulpreserving
obsessions. In stories that range from high-definition realism to wistful surrealism, Dawkins
illuminates the nuances of prison life from the fragility of inmate friendships to the constant assault of
memories and regrets, sensual deprivation, the intricate web of lies and power plays, and the many shades of
stoicism. Sorrowful, hard-hitting, and compassionate, these finely formed, quietly devastating stories are
told with unusual and magnetizing authority: four years after earning an MFA in fiction writing, Dawkins
began serving a life sentence without parole.--Donna Seaman
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Seaman, Donna. "The Graybar Hotel." Booklist, June 2017, p. 52. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498582687/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=30e63681.
Accessed 27 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A498582687
The Graybar Hotel
Publishers Weekly.
264.22 (May 29, 2017): p38.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Graybar Hotel
Curtis Dawkins. Scribner, $26 (224p) ISBN 9781-5011-6229-9
Set mostly in jails and prisons--the author is himself serving a sentence of life without parole--the 14 stories
in this debut collection give a fascinating human dimension to the lives of prisoners and the world that they
inhabit. In "A Human Number," the convict narrator discovers that his random phone calls from jail reach
outsiders who are as desperate as he is to communicate with another person. The narrator of "573543"
ponders the fate foreordained for prisoners who inherit their identifying numbers from previously deceased
inmates. "In the Dayroom with Stinky" sets the tone for its portrait of an eccentric prisoner with the
narrator's bracingly honest admission, "Most of my friends have killed someone." Dawkins's tales impress
with the authenticity of real-life experience, and his prose is rich in metaphor and imagery--as when he
describes one prisoner's arraignment as "his courtroom wedding to the state of Michigan, till death do you
part," and how the fogged-up windows of a prison transport van "effectively erased us" from the outside
world. His often wryly amusing observations about the routines of prison life make him a striking guide for
navigating the terrain. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Graybar Hotel." Publishers Weekly, 29 May 2017, p. 38. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A494500679/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=be18ce59.
Accessed 27 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A494500679
Life & Style Books Illinois native — convicted murderer with writing degree — pens book from prison Scribner Kathleen Rooney Chicago Tribune Most books' publication dates fall on Tuesdays — that's just the industry standard. So the fact that Curtis Dawkins' debut story collection, "The Graybar Hotel," had July 4 as its official release date is not that surprising — the Fourth of July happened to land on a Tuesday this year. Rather, the irony lies in that Independence Day should be the launch date for a book by a man who will theoretically never be free. Dawkins, a Louisville, Ill., native who earned his master's degree in fiction writing from Western Michigan University in 2000, is serving life without the possibility of parole at the Michigan Reformatory in Ionia, Mich., for a drug-related homicide he committed during a home invasion in 2004. In the acknowledgments, he admits and expresses remorse for his crime: "The night I killed a man was a horrible ordeal, especially for his family, my family — everyone traumatized by my actions. I still struggle with guilt and sorrow. There's often so much sadness and grief in my heart, it feels like I might explode." Almost every one of the 14 short stories in the collection seems to have originated from something Dawkins experienced or witnessed in jail or prison, and almost every one reflects with devastating compassion on the guilt and regrets of the criminals inside. In "Sunshine," he writes, "When you're separated from the people you know and love, every emotion is multiplied. ... We were all responsible for being there, of course — none of us were innocent. But that only makes you feel worse." "A Human Number" takes as its subject a prisoner so consumed by loneliness that he places collect calls to strangers simply to connect with people outside: "You're supposed to record your name, so when the person picks up, the generic computer operator asks if you will accept a call from so-and-so from jail. Mine says, Hey, it's me. Just something I came up with. Not many people know someone with my name, but everyone knows a me." Paid Post What's This? Wyandotte, MI's NEW RULE Sponsored by Comparisons.org Drivers With No Tickets In 3 Years Are In For A Big Surprise See More In "573543" — whose title comes from Dawkins' prisoner number — a man receives the number of another inmate who had died, this detail of impersonal bureaucracy speaking volumes about the bleak texture of life within such a vast, harsh system. "According to the Department of Corrections," he writes, "the prisoner has been 'released by death.'" In perhaps the best story in the collection for its inextricable mix of humor and sadness, "Engulfed," a prisoner makes a list of 152 of his fellow inmate's lies, including "Julia Roberts was a penpal" and "He died twice and met God both times." Besides the prison setting, the constant that binds these stories together is the atrocious tedium and isolation of an imprisoned existence — the monotony of being locked away from free society in the name of punishment. It's hard to read "The Graybar Hotel" and not think about the prison crisis in America, with 2.3 million people behind bars, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, an advocacy group seeking reforms to address mass incarceration. Also about the fact that white people make up 64 percent of the U.S. population but only 39 percent of the incarcerated population, whereas black people make up 13 percent of the U.S. population but a disproportionate 40 percent of the incarcerated one. It's hard, too, not to wonder about the privilege of the author, a white man, and consider how many other incarcerated authors — perhaps people of color, perhaps women, perhaps both — might be struggling to have their voices heard. And that maybe is the biggest benefit of this book's existence. It's well-written and worth reading for Dawkins' craft and insight, but it's also an occasion to consider an industry that has little to do with rehabilitation, and that makes it nearly impossible for its participants to recuperate their lives. As Dawkins himself says on the book's final page: "I pray that we all find forgiveness, freedom, and peace. Inside and out."
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 home robbery, killed a man on Halloween 2004. Since late 2005, he’s served 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 Graybar Hotel is his first book.
The New York Times
Book Review
An Addict, a Confessed Killer and Now a Debut Author
By ALEXANDRA ALTERJULY 2, 2017
Curtis Dawkins with his children Lily Rose, left, and Elijah, right, at home in Portage, Mich., in 2003. A year later, he shot and killed Thomas Bowman.
COLDWATER, Mich. — One October night in 2004, Curtis Dawkins smoked crack, dressed up for Halloween in a gangster costume and terrorized a household, killing one man and taking another hostage in a rampage that drew 24 patrol officers and a six-member SWAT team. He is serving a life sentence without parole in Michigan.
On Tuesday, he will also be a published author when his debut story collection is released by Scribner, a literary imprint at one of the country’s top publishing houses. The unlikely story of how Mr. Dawkins, a recovering addict and confessed killer, landed a major book deal is a strange inversion of the usual prison-writing trajectory:
Mr. Dawkins began as writer, earning a Master of Fine Arts degree before he committed his crime. And while his book, “The Graybar Hotel,” has received early praise from writers like Roddy Doyle and Atticus Lish, its release has also raised uncomfortable questions for the publisher as it tries to win over booksellers and critics to rally behind a work by an unknown debut writer — who is also a convicted murderer.
Most of the stories in “The Graybar Hotel” take place in jail or prison and are narrated in the first person, often by an unnamed prisoner. In “573543,” an inmate called Pepper Pie is given a dead man’s prison identification number and learns to become invisible and pass through walls, eventually escaping. The story’s title comes from Mr. Dawkins’s real prison ID number.
In “The Boy Who Dreamed Too Much,” the narrator is quarantined and undergoes psychological evaluation before being assigned to one of Michigan’s prisons. The protagonist’s crime is never revealed, but his guilt is palpable. The smell of burning tobacco “caused me to think of home and all the pain I’d caused,” he reflects. “I thought of my children and freedom, everything I’d taken and lost.”
The novelist Nickolas Butler said he was hesitant to endorse the book, given the gravity of Mr. Dawkins’s crime. He ultimately gave it a glowing blurb, calling the stories “authentic and rare” after learning of Mr. Dawkins’s remorse. “I wanted to know what happened and where he is with that now, because obviously there was a family that was shattered by his actions,” he said.
Photo
“The Graybar Hotel,” written by Curtis Dawkins.
Credit
Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times
Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of members of that family have serious misgivings. Kenneth Bowman, the victim’s younger brother, said he wished that Mr. Dawkins, now 49, had received the death penalty. “I don’t think he should have the right to publish anything,” said Mr. Bowman, a contractor in Phoenix. “He should be doing nothing in that prison but going through hell for the rest of his life.”
Readers may have their own qualms and questions. Mr. Dawkins briefly refers to his crime in the book’s acknowledgments in a cursory mention that hardly captures the night of the shooting and its horrific aftermath, writing, “There’s often so much sadness and grief in my heart, it feels like I might explode.”
Nearly 13 years later, Mr. Dawkins still cannot fathom what drove him to murder.
“I don’t want to blame the drugs and say that it wasn’t me, because part of it was me,” he said during an interview. “I’ve spent the years afterwards trying to understand the events of that night.”
A Relapse, Then Violence
Mr. Dawkins grew up in Louisville, Ill., where his family ran a grocery store and meatpacking plant.
He started drinking when he was 12, a habit that worsened in his 20s, leading him to drop out of college.
In 1991, he went to an addiction treatment center and began attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. He eventually got sober and took a job in his father’s meatpacking business. When a man he met at A.A. gave Mr. Dawkins books by Faulkner and Salinger, he fell in love with fiction and went back to school to study English at Southern Illinois University.
He later enrolled in a graduate writing program at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, where he studied with Elizabeth McCracken, Jaimy Gordon and Stuart Dybek. In a writing workshop, he met Kimberly Knutsen, a Ph.D. student in English, and in 1998, they started dating. She had a 3-year-old son, Henry, and after they had been together for several months, they had a son, Elijah, born prematurely, at 26 weeks. About two years later, they had a daughter, Lily Rose, also premature.
They bought a house in nearby Portage, Mich., and Mr. Dawkins found a job as a car salesman while Ms. Knutsen worked on her dissertation. He went to A.A. meetings regularly, attended a nondenominational church and took the children to Pokémon conferences and baseball games.
But money was tight, and the couple argued. Mr. Dawkins began to slip back into addiction, starting with prescription painkillers. He started using ketamine, then heroin. In the summer of 2004, Ms. Knutsen asked him to move out. As his drug use escalated, he became paranoid about meeting drug dealers and bought a gun for protection, a Smith & Wesson .357-caliber revolver.
The night he killed Thomas Bowman, 48, a house painter who lived in Kalamazoo near the college campus, Mr. Dawkins went first to see Ms. Knutsen and the children. They had dinner together, and he watched a baseball game on TV with Henry, who was 10. He said he was going home to watch a movie and would call Ms. Knutsen later. It was Saturday, Oct. 30, and he planned to come back the next night to hand out candy while Ms. Knutsen went trick-or-treating with Henry; Lily Rose, 4; and Elijah, who was almost 6.
Instead, he went to the north side of Kalamazoo and bought and smoked crack, which he later told the police that he had never tried before. He drank alcohol for the first time in years. At some point, he put on a Halloween costume, a 1920s-style gangster suit and hat purchased at Goodwill, and a menacing flesh-colored mask. He grabbed his gun and wandered down the block to some off-campus Halloween parties.
The first 911 call came in around 1:40 a.m., according to the police report. Mr. Dawkins had approached a group of people on the street, in front of a house where a party was going on. A young man named Jarrod Keeler asked Mr. Dawkins what his costume was supposed to be. Mr. Dawkins suddenly pulled out his revolver and put it against Mr. Keeler’s forehead. Mr. Keeler, who at first thought the gun was part of a costume, grabbed at the revolver, and Mr. Dawkins ran down the street, firing into the air.
He ended up in front of Mr. Bowman’s house. Mr. Bowman was on the porch, smoking a cigarette. Mr. Dawkins asked him for money. When Mr. Bowman refused and told him to leave, Mr. Dawkins shot him in the chest.
A nearby police officer heard gunfire, called for backup and headed toward the house. He could see Mr. Dawkins through the windows. Mr. Dawkins started banging on the doors of the rooms where Mr. Bowman’s housemates were sleeping. One of them climbed out of his window onto the roof of the porch to escape. Another locked his door.
The third, James Honz, opened his door, and Mr. Dawkins entered with his gun raised and ordered him to sit on his bed. Then he pointed his revolver at Mr. Honz’s head and told him to kneel. He asked Mr. Honz if he was afraid to die, and told him to get ready to meet Jesus.
A six-member SWAT team arrived at the house, where Mr. Dawkins had barricaded the bedroom door with a mini-refrigerator and an air conditioner. When the police tried to ram through, he shot at the wall and yelled that he would kill anyone who entered.
One of the officers tried talking to Mr. Dawkins, asking if he believed in God, and telling him that God would forgive him. Mr. Dawkins let Mr. Honz go, then shut the door and asked for a phone. He wanted to call Ms. Knutsen and the children to say goodbye before he shot himself. Mr. Dawkins eventually came out shortly before 4 a.m. with his hands up.
The detective who took Mr. Dawkins’s videotaped confession, Michael Slancik, said Mr. Dawkins had seemed dazed and unclear about why he had done it. “He wasn’t a jerk, he wasn’t yelling, he wasn’t bouncing off the walls or anything,” Detective Slancik said. “I’m going to actually say that he was calm.”
The victim, Mr. Bowman, had had a difficult childhood, and suffered from a learning disability so severe that he didn’t learn to read until he was 17. He eventually got his G.E.D., married and later divorced, and started his own business. He was a well-known figure in his corner of Kalamazoo, where he served on the neighborhood watch and delivered food to neighbors who were elderly or on welfare.
“Tom wasn’t a perfect person, but he tried, and his death has left a big hole,” his brother Kenneth said.
Photo
Curtis Dawkins is serving a life sentence without parole at a prison in Michigan.
Credit
Michigan Department of Correction
Mr. Dawkins was convicted on nine counts, including felony murder. At the trial, Mr. Bowman’s mother, Sharon Hilton, confronted him, and said that she forgave him despite the pain he had caused.
“Obviously it wasn’t easy,” Ms. Hilton, a devout Christian, said in a phone interview from her home in Crab Orchard, Tenn. Now, she feels pity for Mr. Dawkins more than anything, and said she was happy that he’s found a purpose through writing. “I can’t think of anything more horrific than having to spend your life in prison,” she said.
Commercial and Ethical Barriers
It’s surprising how little contemporary fiction has emerged from American prisons. More than two million people in the United States are incarcerated, and many prisons have writing programs. PEN America runs a writing program that reaches more than 20,000 prisoners. But very little contemporary prison literature is released by major publishing houses, which seldom consider writers who are not represented by agents and which may be wary of the logistical and ethical pitfalls of working with convicts.
In 1981, Random House published “In the Belly of the Beast,” a collection of writing by Jack Henry Abbott, a convict who served time for bank robbery and other crimes. He was befriended by Norman Mailer, who lobbied for Mr. Abbott to go free. Shortly after his release, Mr. Abbott was arrested in New York for stabbing a waiter to death.
Prisoners are allowed to write and publish books under the First Amendment, so the barriers tend to be commercial and ethical rather than legal. In some states, convicts are prohibited from personally profiting from a work of nonfiction that describes their crimes, and money made from such works can be seized and put in a fund for victims or their families.
In 1991, the Supreme Court struck down New York’s “Son of Sam” law, which barred convicted criminals from profiting by writing books or creating other forms of entertainment based on their crimes. The court determined that the law was too broad and violated free speech protections, ruling in favor of the plaintiff, Simon & Schuster, which had paid the convicted mobster Henry Hill to publish a book based on his life.
Scribner faces an awkward challenge in promoting “The Graybar Hotel.” While early reviews have been largely positive, “some people have been scared off by his circumstances and have mixed feelings about supporting somebody who’s committed the kind of crime that he has,” Kathy Belden, Mr. Dawkins’s editor, said.
Those who knew Mr. Dawkins in graduate school were shocked and unnerved by his crime. After his arrest, one of his former writing teachers, Ms. Gordon, reached out to Ms. Knutsen. No one wrote to Mr. Dawkins.
About a year after the trial, Ms. Knutsen and the children moved to Portland, Ore. She still speaks to Mr. Dawkins on the phone nearly every day and refers to him as her partner and best friend. She has never gotten over the shock of what happened.
“It’s like a bomb that just keeps going off,” she said.
Elijah, who just graduated from high school, suffered from acute anxiety and missed a year of middle school. Lily Rose, 16, was so distraught when the family last visited Mr. Dawkins three years ago that she wouldn’t go in to see him. Henry, 22, remains close to Mr. Dawkins and speaks to him several times a week. He still has dreams about bumping into Mr. Dawkins in the grocery store, then wakes up and remembers that Mr. Dawkins will never get out of prison.
For the first 10 months he was incarcerated, Mr. Dawkins couldn’t write. Jail was crowded and chaotic, and he felt suicidal. Once he got to quarantine, where he underwent psychological evaluations before being assigned to a prison, he wrote down the first line of his short story, “County,” inspired by his experience when he was first incarcerated in the Kalamazoo County jail. Like Mr. Dawkins, the narrator suffers from opiate withdrawal and is considered a suicide risk.
Writing became an escape for Mr. Dawkins.
“A part of me realized, if I’m going to live through this, I’m going to have to find a purpose,” he said.
With an electric typewriter sent by his parents, he typed his stories and mailed them to his younger sister, who submitted them to literary magazines. Most of his queries were met with silence or rejection, but a few stories were published in small journals.
Last year, Jarrett Haley, the founder of a small literary magazine, Bull, gave a selection of the stories to a literary agent, Sandra Dijkstra. A few days after she signed Mr. Dawkins, Ms. Dijkstra sold the stories to Scribner for a low-six-figure advance; Mr. Dawkins’s share goes into an education fund for his children.
Nan Graham, Scribner’s senior vice president and publisher, said that when she first read the work, she was astonished that Mr. Dawkins had managed to create “such devastating stories out of tedium.”
“There are a lot of people in prison who try to learn how to write, but there aren’t very many people who go into prison with an M.F.A. and with the tool kit to write fiction,” she said.
Mr. Dawkins — who is wiry, with short, thinning gray hair, a narrow face and watchful hazel eyes — comes across as a bookish introvert. During a two-and-a-half-hour interview at Lakeland Correctional Facility, he weighed his words carefully and appeared most at ease talking about the writers he admires — Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Lydia Davis, George Saunders, Joy Williams. He has the opening of Mr. Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” tattooed across his chest: “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.”
Recently, Mr. Dawkins has worked on a futuristic novel set in a massive, hivelike subterranean prison. The surreal setting seems to reflect something Mr. Dawkins still struggles with: the reality that he’s probably never getting out.
“I don’t know if I have come to terms with it,” he said. “Sometimes, walking around the yard, I still catch myself thinking, How’d you end up here?”
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
Follow Alexandra Alter on Twitter @xanalter.
A version of this article appears in print on July 3, 2017, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: An Addict. A Killer. Now a Published Author.
August 11, 2017
Review: Curtis Dawkins’ “The Graybar Hotel”
by Charles R. Larson
Controversial books and controversial writers have been around ever since there have been books and writers. When I used to teach American literature, what was I expected to say about Ezra Pound? How was I supposed to regard Jack Abbott, Norman Mailer’s protégé, who after Mailer helped him publish a book committed a murder? What about Mailer himself who no doubt would have ended up in prison if his wife had pressed charges after he tried to kill her? Add to the list of controversy Curtis Dawkins, “incarcerated since 2004 for a drug-related homicide, for which he’s serving life without parole.” That quotation concludes Dawkins brief author’s biography on the jacket of The Graybar Hotel, after identifying the writer as receiving “an MFA in fiction writing from Western Michigan University in 2000.”
These are not easy questions to resolve.
A recent New York Times article about Dawkins begins: “One October night in 2004, Curtis Dawkins smoked crack, dressed up for Halloween in a gangster costume and terrorized a household, killing one man and taking another hostage in a rampage that drew 24 patrol officers and a six-member SWAT team.” Late in the article, written by Alexander Alter, the writer observes, “It’s surprising how little contemporary fiction has emerged from American prisons. More than two million people in the United States are incarcerated, and many prisons have writing programs. PEN runs a writing program that reaches more than 20,000 prisoners. But very little contemporary prison literature is released by major publishing houses, which seldom consider writers who are not represented by agents and which may be wary of the logistical and ethical pitfalls of working with convicts.”
Dawkins’ case is somewhat different. He had already earned his MFA by the time he committed the murder. He was married and had three young children. Supposedly, everything was going well for him, but then he snapped, though the information about him also says that he was an alcoholic and an addict. Whatever, this is the sad story of more lives being lost to addiction, both the victim and the murderer and the families of both. Still, it’s difficult to read The Graybar Hotel and ignore all the background relating to the author. If you read the book, you will have to ask yourself the same questions I asked before deciding to give the book, a collection of stories, a try.
I confess to the revelations Dawkins makes about prison life: boredom, lies, deceit, humiliation, small acts of charity and remorse, brief moments of pleasure. And although a few of the sections of the book are plotted like actual short stories, many of them are more appropriately described as vignettes, incidents of prison life, often quite revealing though not especially distinguished. For example, a story titled “A Human Number,” describes an act we are led to believe is common by inmates: blindly dialing telephone numbers (like robocalls) and hoping that the party at the other end will agree to accept the collect charges and speak to the caller. Apparently, there are numerous people who agree, perhaps as lonely as the prisoner is for human contact, for someone to talk to. If you’ve been successful making that call, you want to remember the phone number so you can call back again. This is all pretty depressing no matter how you interpret the activity.
Or consider this powerful opening to a story called “Sunshine”: “George had come back from the visiting room where his girlfriend, Sunshine, just told him she had cancer. He couldn’t touch her or hold her, of course, through the phone, through the glass. He said he almost tried to smash through the thick, shatterproof pane, but he figured he’d be tackled long before he ever got to comfort her. He looked around at us with the anger still in his eyes, as if expecting praise for his restraint from trying something that would have been impossible to begin with.”
What Dawkins captures so depressingly in his stories is the sense of claustrophobia, of limited or non-existent options that prison confirms on its inmates. The troubled lives of the other inmates he describes (the numerous bunkmates he lists who come and go with amazing frequency) become a catalog of social misfits with self-inflicted wounds that resulted in their incarceration in the first place. He provides them with colorful names that capture their features and obsessions: Pepper Pie, Stinky, Crasher, Catfish, Doo-Wop, Slim—plus their small acts of protest to break out of the patterns of everyday confinement. Dawkins reports that one bunkmate with an actual given name, Robert, told him 152 lies in the thirty days they were together, beginning with the following: “He punched a female warden twice.” “His ex-wife was once a centerfold in Penthouse.” “His father was a submarine captain who was lost at sea.” “Geronimo was a relative (also: Timothy McVeigh, Babe Ruth, Abraham Lincoln, and many more, usually whoever was on the History Channel recently).” “Julia Roberts was a pen pal.”
The list goes on, and finally Dawkins observes, “”Lies are a drug here; prisoners are addicts and as any addict sinks deeper and deeper into their sickness, they seek out people who are worse off than them so they don’t feel so bad about themselves.” It’s finally other inmates and their tragic mistakes, their excuses, and their subterfuge for survival, that move us in The Graybar Hotel, a great title by the way.
There but for the accidents of fate go the rest of us.
Curtis Dawkins: The Graybar Hotel
Scribner, 210 pp., $26
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Charles R. Larson is Emeritus Professor of Literature at American University, in Washington, D.C. Email = clarson@american.edu. Twitter @LarsonChuck.
Michigan prisoner turned celebrated author may face incarceration bill
Curtis Dawkins wrote The Graybar Hotel while serving a life sentence. Now the state says proceeds from the work belong to them
The murderer who hopes writing fiction will set him free
Edward Helmore in New York
Mon 19 Feb 2018 13.58 EST
Last modified on Tue 20 Feb 2018 09.44 EST
Curtis Dawkins received a $150,000 advance from his book publisher. Photograph: Michigan Department of Corrections
Curtis Dawkins, a Michigan prisoner and publishing sensation, could be forced to repay the costs of his incarceration from the proceeds of his literary work.
Dawkins is serving a life sentence for a 2004 crime spree on Halloween night that left one man dead. His debut collection of short stories, The Graybar Hotel, was written in a Michigan penitentiary and published in July.
But now the Michigan department of treasury is seeking 90% of Dawkins’ assets, including “proceeds from publications, future payments, royalties” from the book. Michigan puts the cost of his incarceration at $72,000; Dawkins, 49, received a $150,000 advance from Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.
Curtis Dawkins with his children in 2003. Photograph: pr
The state claims that Dawkins, who is representing himself at a hearing next week in Kalamazoo, has no right to pass his literary earnings to his family.
But Dawkins, who has expressed deep remorse for the murder and described writing as his “lifeboat”, claims his family is being unfairly punished. He says state law contains a provision stating that the court must take into account “any legal and moral obligation” he has to support his children.
Kenneth Bowman, the brother of Dawkins’ victim Tom Bowman, told the New York Times last year he believes that any money Dawkins receives should go to the victim’s family or a charity.
Bowman told the Detroit News he wished Michigan had the death penalty. Given the opportunity, Bowman said, he’d administer it himself.
Break-out stories: the murderer who hopes writing fiction will set him free
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Not long after, Michigan made its claim demanding partial “reimbursement to the state for defendant’s cost of care while incarcerated”. Many states have provisions to bar inmates from profiting from nonfiction accounts of their crimes by directing proceeds to victim families, but not to reimburse for their incarceration itself.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University school of law, Michigan is one of more than 40 states where prisoners can be forced to pay for the cost of their incarceration.
In recent years, the Times reports, state government claims for reimbursement are increasing and can now include medical care, clothing, meals, police transport, public defense fees, drug testing and electronic monitoring.
Last year, Michigan collected $3.7m from 294 prisoners. The state counts 40,000 inmates of the 2.2 million adults in US jails. According to the Brennan center, roughly 10 million people owe $50bn in fees stemming from their arrest or imprisonment.
In a 2015 paper, Charging Inmates Perpetuates Mass Incarceration, the center concluded that while it was understandable that states would look to offset the high costs of incarceration, “it is unreasonable to require a population whose debt to society is already being paid by the sentences imposed, 80% of whom are indigent, to help foot the bill.”
Lauren-Brooke Eisen, author of the report, told the Times that to be deprived of liberty and then be required to pay for the separation from society “raises cruel and unusual punishment issues”. H Bruce Franklin, author of Prison Literature in America, says such measures could dissuade prisoner-writers from publishing at all.
Dawkins, a father of three, has said the practice of writing allows him to exist in an imaginary world. Writing about a fictional prison eases the burden of being in a real one. “It gets me away from the world I’m trying to turn into fiction, if that makes any sense,” he told the Detroit News.
But until the legal matter is resolved, Dawkins’ finances are effectively frozen. He split his initial advance with Jarrett Haley, the founder of Bull, a small literary magazine, who had helped him get a book deal.
He placed around $50,000 in a fund to help to pay for college and high school for his children. But on orders of the state, the final advance payments from his publisher have been suspended.
A press spokesman for the Michigan attorney general said the office “cannot comment on pending litigation”.
Summary and book reviews of The Graybar Hotel by Curtis Dawkins
Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the book | Readalikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
The Graybar Hotel
Stories
by Curtis Dawkins
First Published:
Jul 2017, 224 pages
Paperback:
May 8, 2018, 224 pages
Debut Author
Rate this book
Book Reviewed by:
Poornima Apte
Book Summary
In this stunning debut collection, Curtis Dawkins, an MFA graduate and convicted murderer serving life without parole, takes us inside the worlds of prison and prisoners with stories that dazzle with their humor and insight, even as they describe a harsh and barren existence.
In Curtis Dawkins's first short story collection, he offers a window into prison life through the eyes of his narrators and their cellmates. Dawkins reveals the idiosyncrasies, tedium, and desperation of long-term incarceration - he describes men who struggle to keep their souls alive despite the challenges they face.
In "A Human Number," a man spends his days collect-calling strangers just to hear the sounds of the outside world. In "573543," an inmate recalls his descent into addiction as his prison softball team gears up for an annual tournament against another unit. In "Leche Quemada," an inmate is released and finds freedom more complex and baffling then he expected. Dawkins's stories are funny and sad, filled with unforgettable detail - the barter system based on calligraphy-ink tattoos, handmade cards, and cigarettes; a single dandelion smuggled in from the rec yard; candy made from powdered milk, water, sugar, and hot sauce. His characters are nuanced and sympathetic, despite their obvious flaws.
The Graybar Hotel tells moving, human stories about men enduring impossible circumstances. Dawkins takes readers beyond the cells into characters' pasts and memories and desires, into the unusual bonds that form during incarceration and the strained relationships with family members on the outside. He's an extraordinary writer with a knack for metaphor, and this is a powerful compilation of stories that gives voice to the experience of perhaps the most overlooked members of our society.
Despite the dark material, The Graybar Hotel never spirals into the depths of despair. The sharp writing and engaging narrators elevate the collection into an intelligent and eagle-eyed look at a part of the world most of us hope to never see. (Reviewed by Poornima Apte).
The Graybar Hotel makes one reflect on the incarceration rates in the United States and the reason for its explosion over recent decades.
Readers might remember the George H. W. Bush vs. then Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis presidential campaign. It has been argued that two commercials truly sealed Dukakis's fate: The Willie Horton ad and the Revolving Door clip. Borrowing heavily from the "fear factor" handbook, the campaign implied that Dukakis was soft on crime, giving murderers like Willie Horton, "weekend passes" to leave prison and commit more of them. America, the Bush campaign argued, couldn't afford somebody with such lenient stances on criminals. Politicians have sometimes adopted such approaches, thereby stoking ...
Short stories
The Graybar Hotel by Curtis Dawkins review – short stories
This debut collection, set in the US prison system, is compelling and real
Sandra Newman
Fri 8 Sep 2017 07.01 EDT
Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 07.39 EST
t’s hard to imagine approaching this debut collection of short stories, set in the US prison system, without the knowledge that Curtis Dawkins is a prisoner serving a life sentence without parole. Dawkins killed a man in the commission of a botched robbery at a time when he was addicted to drugs, a crime that’s fairly commonplace for the hapless but gravely culpable people who end up spending their lives in prison. Less typical is the fact that, before he went to prison, Dawkins earned an MFA in creative writing.
This combination results in a book that is remarkable for its modesty, realism and humanity. There’s no trace of the grand guignol sadism and preoccupation with sexual violence that typify popular prison narratives, from Oz to Prisoner Cell Block H. Instead, Dawkins gives us prison as it is for most inmates most of the time: a series of dull, claustrophobic days, in which men oppress each other not with violence, but tedium. His characters play dominoes, tell interminable stories, sell handmade Christmas cards to each other, obsessively watch sports. The existence of violence is acknowledged, but it’s left at the margins of the narrative. The more present danger, to which various characters succumb, is the temptation of suicide.
Curtis Dawkins, who is serving a life sentence without parole at prison in Michigan. Photograph: Michigan Department of Corrections
The risk of this approach, of course, is that the stories could be as boring and shapeless as prison life itself. But Dawkins has a genius for bringing characters to life and making mundane situations compelling, if only because they feel so real. Throughout, it’s the tiny details that keep us invested; a prisoner missing life outside remembers how “when I would mow my yard, my dog followed close behind me, and when I would stop he’d run into the back of my legs”.
In “A Human Number”, a prisoner uses his phone time to make collect calls to random numbers; he finds a kindly elderly woman who reads the Book of Revelation to him, then pauses to take a pie out of the oven and begins to talk to it “as if it were a small child or a puppy: ‘Oh, you are a nice little yummy thing, aren’t you. You are just perfect … ’ ”
Most of the characters reflect on the past; the empty days of prison become a mirror in which they continually face the shortcomings that brought them here.
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In the story “Daytime Drama”, a prisoner with mental health issues wears a blanket as a cape and babbles unguardedly to other prisoners, asking to borrow one man’s teeth and telling a gay man: “You must dream of going to prison.” We keep expecting someone to react badly and hurt him, but the other prisoners make allowances for his mental illness and treat him with humour and patience.
We learn that he has “uncles in prison all over the country”, in addition to one uncle who has been executed by lethal injection. His own crime (which is never specified) carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison. He doesn’t grasp the horror of any of this, and seems to have no memory of whatever he did; he’s just trying not to lose control in the time before his next medication.
In the final story, “Leche Quemada”, a man returns home after 12 years in prison for a crime that’s similar to Dawkins’s. Remarkably, his girlfriend has remained faithful; but what this means is that he returns to the same petty relationship problems he had before. He can’t satisfy her demands; she doesn’t share his enthusiasms. He ends up saying to the dog: “Did I ever leave?” He tells himself to be grateful for his second chance at life, but also finds he’s uncomfortably nostalgic for prison. He’s terrifyingly unsure he’ll be able to make it outside, and sadly reflects that “all the good parts [of life] appeared to be over: the kids growing up, climbing the career ladder, family trips everyone would always remember”.
The Graybar Hotel is a debut, and like most debuts, it isn’t perfect. It has its overwrought images, its passages of cod Denis Johnson, its ill-judged foray into magical realism. There are cringeworthy moments of phoned-in psychology: “He would change or he wouldn’t. Some men never do. They spend the rest of their lives denying the truth, protecting the illusions that protect them from their past.” But Dawkins has a gravitas and clear-sightedness that carries us past these moments.
He has produced a book that is not only moving and genuine, but genuinely important; one that, without resorting to shock tactics, powerfully conveys the perverse inhumanity of mass incarceration.
• Sandra Newman’s The Country of Ice Cream Star is published by Vintage.
The Graybar Hotel is published by Canongate. To order a copy for £14.44 (RRP £16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.