Career
Born to a rural family in Grifton, North Carolina, Grimsley said of his childhood that "for us in the South, the family is a field where craziness grows like weeds". After moving to Atlanta he would spend nearly twenty years as a secretary at Atlanta"s Grady Memorial Hospital before joining the creative-writing faculty at Emory University. During those years, Grimsley wrote prolifically, with fourteen of his plays produced between 1983 and 1993.