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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 New Letters, Witness, Black Warrior Review, Glimmer Train, Meridian, The Greensboro Review, Chicago Reader, CutBank, The South Dakota Review, The Southeast Review, The Literary Review, Wind, Philadelphia Stories, StorySouth, and Sycamore Review, and are forthcoming in Madison Review and Early American Studies.

You can order the book directly from the good folks at The University of Georgia Press by clicking here.

The book is also available on Amazon.

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 two cats, who are named for famous 1970s country music singers.

My personal website is here.

Some words of praise:

"Masterful....With this rich and mesmerizing collection of short fiction, Downs underscores the enduring truth of William Faulkner's observation 'The past is never dead. In fact, it's not even past.'"--Philadelphia Inquirer

"One of the most entertaining books of short stories in a long time . . . quintessentially American and, by turns, serious, playful, maudlin, and humorous....At the heart of all the stories are the beautiful, unforgiving relationships between men and women....Downs' characters possess strong will and refreshing identity . . . often missing in today's literature.....By toying with history, Downs might be getting closer to the truth than all the history books you had to read in high school."--Lexington Herald-Leader

"If Flannery O'Connor is right--that we will be known not by our statements but by the stories we tell--then we are in good hands....Downs has written a book that explores the precariousness of history in our amnesiac modernity....in his tales of historical intrusion, Downs also speaks elegantly of those ugly histories, namely of racism and hatred, that we'd rather forget, and paints a hopeful portrait of the role family can play in healing those wounds....[The story 'Black Pork'] could serve as a founding myth for a racially integrated South, if such a place could be said to exist."--San Francisco Chronicle

A "luminous new collection" about "cousins of Binx Bolling on the less genteel side of the family" . . . "who display an innocence bordering on ignorance, until a moment of sudden and bitter epiphany"--Small Spiral Notebook

A "multifaceted and exquisite rendering of the modern (and postmodern) south....Spit Baths manages to capture the richly changing tapestry that makes up the modern southern experience."....In Spit Baths, Downs manages to be part of the vital current of southern literary tradition and absolutely free from its restrictive ties....Buy this book. Hold onto it, loan it out, force it on friends. You'll be glad you did." --- storySouth

"Spit Baths takes us straight to the heartland and lets us into the strange inner lives of an array of characters who are defined by where they are—whether in Kentucky, Tennessee, Hawaii, or yes, even the bathroom. Like Flannery O’Connor, Downs gives us a nuanced view of an imperfect life in the South....The characters that populate Downs’ debut fiction are hauntingly vulnerable; their unique voices capture their desperation—be they poor Southern whites, confused teenage boys, or gutsy matriarchs."--Christine Condon, Editor's Choice, The Literary Review

"While Downs explores the failure of affection among a doomed masculinity, he also creates a strong and generous femininity. His prose is evocative and finely tuned to his gritty material, and his narratives illuminate his characters and their concerns while acknowledging that the social forces that inform both are impossible to explicate, not because they are too far outside the reader’s experience but, rather, because they are too close."--Sierra Bellows, Virginia Quarterly Review

"Downs defines his characters by the places they come from and the people they leave behind.....As Downs shows repeatedly in this strong collection, even the places we think we've behind never quite let go of us."--Main Line magazine

"Downs' characters often straddle the old and new South, and wear their geographical location as a birthmark. These stories sit proudly on my bookshelf next to George Singleton's Drowning in Gruel and Sidney Thompson's Sideshow as evidence that the southern short story is alive, well, and evolving. Flannery O'Connor would be very proud."--Largehearted Boy

"Downs doesn't write about this new South of homogenous big-box retail and diversifying populations, of booming exurbs and shriveling small towns. The world he conjures in Spit Baths is closer to Flannery O'Connor's own....His characters are obsessed with the past and in flight from it." ---Nashville Scene

"Raymond Carver-esque sad sagas grounded in the forgotten dirt roads of a neglected America."--34th Street

"A kaleidoscopic description of an extended family falling apart that is as disorienting as it is beautiful....simultaneously excruciating and deeply insightful about race....A strong sense of style and unfaltering command of his material."--Publisher's Weekly

"A series of 13 punchy, white-trashy takes of displacement and youthful perplexity....the first "Adam's Curse" is a mere two pages long and demonstrates the strange beauty of Downs' imagination....a writer to watch."--Kirkus Reviews

"There's immense heart to Downs' quirky but controlled story telling."--Philadelphia Magazine

"Readers are in for a treat"--Christopher Tilghman

"Thoroughly original and completely authentic....he draws back a curtain to reveal a world in which people are always searching, never finding someone or some place they can call home."--Fenton Johnson