the early 1960s. Curtis attended Dewey Elementary, Clark Elementary, Pierce Elementary (in the Academically Gifted Program), Whittier Junior High School, and McKinley Junior High School of the Flint Public School System. In 1967, he was the first African-American student to be elected to the student council in the school's 32-year history. In middle school, Curtis’s favorite books were To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and The Bridges at Toko-Ri by James A. Michener. Curtis also enjoyed reading Mad magazine, Sports Illustrated, Time magazine, and comic books while growing up. His parents valued reading and exposed Curtis and his siblings to a wide variety of books, taking them to the library every Saturday. However, in an interview with the New York Public Library, Curtis stated that, despite reading a lot, he found it difficult to connect to books and stories because they were not by or about black people like himself. He graduated from Flint Southwestern High School in 1971. The summer after graduating from high school, Curtis became a member of a Lansing-based theatrical/musical group called Suitcase Theater which rehearsed on Tuesdays and Thursdays and performed musical numbers and the works of Langston Hughes. The group performed in the United States, Canada, and Europe. After graduating high school, Curtis planned to pursue a political science degree at the University of Michigan-Flint. He attended classes full-time for a year but did not do well in his courses. Due to his poor performance in school and the competitive wage being offered at Flint's General Motors Fisher Body Plant No. 1, Curtis chose to work full-time at the factory on September 15, 1972. During this time, he continued taking classes at night as a part-time student. He graduated from the University of Michigan–Flint in 2000. While in college, Curtis took a black literature course that introduced him to authors like Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison. Not only did this course foster his love for literature, but it also served as inspiration for details and descriptions in some of his novels. Early career Curtis spent 13 years after high school working on the assembly line of Flint's Fisher Body Plant No. 1. His job entailed hanging fifty- to eighty-pound car doors on Buicks for ten hours a day. It was physically demanding as well as monotonous labor. Christopher and his partner at the Plant worked out a deal where, instead