GREG DOWNS Spit Baths

My first book, Spit Baths, is being published by the University of Georgia Press in October, 2006. The book won the Flannery O'Connor Award, and the stories have been published in 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, and Sycamore Review, and are forthcoming in New Letters, Madison Review, and Witness.

Raised in central Kentucky, Middle Tennessee, and an end-of-the-road valley in Kauai, Hawaii, I write about people who are off the map and out of sight. My characters define themselves not by what they wear or where they work but by where they are. Caught up in pasts both personal and epic, they struggle to maintain their peculiar, grounded manners in an increasingly detached world. A man abandoning his family is mistaken for Louisiana dictator Huey P. Long on the day after Long’s assassination, a history teacher marries his student and carries her away from a place she hated only to find neither one of them can leave it behind; an elderly man enlists his grandson to help him scatter his belongings to his many living and dead ex-wives; an old woman about to lose her young grandson in a family feud tries to convey the entirety of her view of religion and nobility through the language of baseball.

Previously, I was the least successful varsity basketball coach in Tennessee, the editor of a muckraking weekly newspaper on Chicago’s South Side, a karaoke performer profiled in the Boston Phoenix, a reporter on the tail of a fugitive cult leader, and a 9th grade English teacher. Currently, I live in West Philadelphia with my wife and cat, who is named for a famous 1970s country music singer.

Along with writing fiction, I also write and research history, and recently received my Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. I am an Assistant Professor of History at a university in New York City.

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