HOW I SHED MY SKIN chronicles award-winning novelist Jim Grimsley’s years of learning --- and then unlearning --- racism. A young white child in a small Southern town, he was taught early that blacks and whites should not mix, until, inexplicably, he found himself sitting among black students in his sixth grade classroom in 1966, the first year of the federally mandated integration of his school. He did not realize just how deeply ingrained his own prejudices were --- despite the fact that prior to starting sixth grade he had never actually known any black people.

As Dorothy Allison so eloquently put it, “The boy in this narrative is becoming a man at a time of enormous change, and his point of view is like a razor cutting through a callus. Painful and healing. Forthright and enormously engaging.”