CLEVELAND BENJAMIN'S DEAD!: A STRUGGLE FOR DIGNITY IN LOUISIANA'S CANE COUNTRY

non-fiction

Patsy Sims grew up in Texas and Louisiana and has drawn from her Southern roots for much of her writing. She is the author of The Klan (Stein & Day, 1978); Cleveland Benjamin's Dead!: A Struggle for Dignity in Louisiana's Cane Country (Dutton, 1981; and Can Somebody Shout Amen!: Inside the Tents and Tabernacles of American Revivalists (St. Martin's, 1988), named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. The Klan and Can Somebody Shout Amen! Were reissued by the University Press of Kentucky and remain in print. Sims also co-wrote the narration for the award-winning documentary The Klan: A Legacy of Hate (Guggenheim Productions, 1982), and is the editor of Literary Nonfiction: Learning by Example (Oxford, 2001), an annotated anthology that analyzes the technical and stylistic devices that go into good writing.  Her current project is a reported memoir about spending childhood summers on the Texas prison farm where her grandfather lived and work and returning, as a journalist, in the late 1990s to spend a year observing life inside the all-male facility.
 
Prior to writing books, she was a writer and editor for the New Orleans States-Item, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Her work has since appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Texas Observer, Preservation, Southern, Southern Exposure, TDC (the Discovery Channel's now-defunct monthly magazine), and most American newspapers. Sims's honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the District of Columbia Commission on the Arts and Humanities; two first places for investigative-interpretive reporting in the Louisiana-Mississippi Associated Press Awards; finalist for a Nieman Fellowship; a residency at the MacDowell Colony; and grants from the Southern Investigative Reporting Project of the Southern Regional Council.  She has directed the MFA in Creative Nonfiction Program at Goucher College since 2001.