Grant Spradling

Grant Spradling says, “to be born at the beginning of the Great Depression, in a small west Oklahoma town, the heart of the Dustbowl, severely dyslexic and, as it turned out, gay, isn’t the most propitious beginning. Still, looking back through the decades, I can’t complain.” Spradling graduated from Weatherford high school, Oklahoma City University, with a double major in music and sociology, and Boston University with a degree in theology. He served as associate minister in Congregational Churches in Attleboro and Cambridge, Massachusetts, took a sabbatical and vagabonded around the world—ran a sleaze bar in St. Thomas, the Virgin Islands, taught in the bush in West Africa, attended the World Council of Churches assembly in New Deli, and fell in love with Japan. After he returned to the US he launched on a ten year singing carrier, he sang with the Metropolitan Opera Studio and on Broadway with luminaries such as Alfred Drake, Ethel Merman, Melina Mercouri, Girogio Tozzi and Beverly Sills and appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show . “I had a brief but not stellar career,” Spradling says. Returning to the church, now The United Church of Christ, he served as arts consultant on the staff of the Board for Homeland Ministers and the Amistad Research Center. He then served as the founding executive director of the Monroe County (Key West and Florida Keys) Fine Arts Council. Spradling’s published work includes From High In The Mulberry Tree, a collection of short stories, and murder mysteries, Maya Sacrifice and The Palenque Murder, and many articles on religion and art. He is co-creator of two volumes of Imaging the Word, a collection of art and literature following the church colander. Hamaca Press is publisher of Palenque Murder and David Goes Home. Severely dyslexic, Spradling says, the computer is like a brain prostheses. Spradling makes his home, with his partner of forty-seven years (married recently in Santa Fe, New Mexico) in Amarillo, Texas and Merida, Yucatan, Mexico.