of alternating hanging doors, one person would hang every door for thirty minutes while the other took a thirty-minute break. During his thirty-minute breaks, Curtis would block out the noise of the factory and find solace and refuge in reading and writing. Curtis recalls hating working in the factory, despite the steady wages and benefits, and even having nightmares about hanging car doors. After quitting Fisher Body in 1985, he took a series of low-paying jobs. He worked as a groundskeeper at Stonegate Manor housing cooperative in Flint, served as the Flint campaign co-manager for United States Senator Donald Riegle in 1988, as a customer service representative for MichCon in Detroit, as a temporary worker for Manpower in Detroit, and as a warehouse clerk for Automated Data Processing in Allen Park, Michigan. Writing career In 1993, Curtis, convinced by Kaysandra (Kay) Sookram, his wife at the time, took a year off of work to focus on his writing. During this year, Curtis took a writing course at the University of Michigan-Flint and entered several works into a contest for the Hopwood Awards. He received first place for both the novel he submitted, The Watsons Go to Florida, and an essay about his career in the auto factory. Following this win, Curtis submitted his novel to contests sponsored by publishing houses, ultimately resulting in the novel being selected by Delacorte Press for publication. Originally, Curtis intended for the story to center around the Watsons' trip to Florida in 1963, but when his son brought home Dudley Randall's poem "The Ballad of Birmingham," Curtis realized that Birmingham would be a more meaningful destination for the Watsons and changed the ending accordingly. In writing the novel, Curtis was also influenced by other literature and his personal experiences growing up in Flint. In his conversation with interviewer and State University of West Georgia Professor Peter E. Morgan, Curtis notes that he was inspired by Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God to personify Death from Kenny's perspective in The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963. In this same interview, Curtis describes his decision to leave out Kenny's relation to white people in despite his editor wanting to create a book that also appealed to white audiences. Curtis grew up in a self-contained Black neighborhood and recalls his lack of day-to-day interactions with races outside his own so he felt that Kenny would have