Author of The Big Dirty

Jimy Valenti writes crime fiction. The Big Dirty, his literary noir set in 1990s Albany, New York, is a novel about family, gambling, organized crime, and two men desperately trying to take back their name. But, you know, it’s also about the Grateful Dead, drugs, hallucinatory violence, and fathers.

Jimy was born on Albany’s Grand Street in 1986 and raised nearby. He moved to Colorado after high school, with dreams of becoming Krakauer. He earned an outdoor education degree from Colorado Mountain College in Glenwood Springs. But along the way, he took more after Kerouac. When dreams of the road faded somewhere closer to reality, he moved to Boulder for journalism school at the University of Colorado. That didn’t take either, and he eventually graduated from CU’s law school in 2015.

The Colorado Public Defender system placed him in the Alamosa office in the heart of the San Luis Valley that same year, where he still practices as a criminal defense attorney. In early 2020, he submitted a draft of a novel he had been working on for years to the Book Project at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop. His work in progress was a crime novel based in the San Luis Valley. As fate would have it, acclaimed crime writer Benjamin Whitmer — author of his own San Luis Valley–based crime novel, Cry Father — accepted Jimy into his cohort for the class of 2022. Ben remains a mentor.

After graduating from the Book Project at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop, Jimy began working on what would become The Big Dirty. Lately, he’s been drawn to short fiction. Jimy published the first piece of guest fiction on Brett Puryear’s Substack, Pedal Steel. Dog Bite is a prime cut of Colorado grit lit set in the San Luis Valley. He then published Killdeer in the Eunoia Review, Away in HeartThrob — an independently published zine from Alamosa, Haircut in Thriller Magazine, and the forthcoming Bank Shot in Bull Magazine, with more on the way. Jimy completed the Kenyon Review workshop in 2026 to further develop his short fiction.

Jimy is a dedicated fan of the Grateful Dead, who always seems to find his people wherever they are hiding. Whether it’s with a group of Heads in the public defender system, or at a small bar in Del Norte, Colorado, he generally can’t shut up about some Dark Star played in 1974 or a Dead cover band nailing a Mind Left Body jam. And of course, as a ’90s kid in the Northeast, Jimy’s seen dozens of Phish shows.

He lives with his wife, two dogs, and two horses near the banks of the Rio Grande in Alamosa, Colorado. He can rattle off the 2007 Rockies roster on command, and hopes that Jokic can get just one more. You can find him skiing Wolf Creek in the winter and mountain biking Penitente Canyon in the summer.