Tony Grooms, the cofounder of the Georgia Writers Association and a Professor of Creative Writing at Kennesaw State University, is the author of Bombingham, a novel published in 2001 about the activism for and resistance against civil rights in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. He also published a collection of stories, Trouble No More, in 1995 as well as a collection of poems, Ice Poems, in 1988. His stories and poems have appeared in Callaloo, African American Review, Crab Orchard Review, George Washington Review, and other literary journals and anthologies. Though the subject matter of his work varies, Grooms’ most notable work has focused on characters struggling with the uncertainty of the American Civil Rights Movement.

Grooms was born in 1955 and was raised and educated in rural Louisa County, Virginia, 120 miles south of Washington, D.C. His father, a refrigeration mechanic, and his mother, a textile worker and housewife, encouraged his education. In 1967, as a preface to the forced racial integration of Virginia’s public school system, his parents enrolled Grooms in the Freedom of Choice plan that brought about limited integration of the white public schools. Though he notes that many of his attitudes about race and class in the United States were formed before 1967, the school integration experience was, nonetheless, a landmark event in his life, contributing to a perspective that is evident in many of his writings.

His writing has gained him significant critical attention. He won the Lillian Smith Book Award in 1996 for Trouble No More and in 2002 for Bombingham. He was a Finalist for the Legacy Award from Hurston-Wright Foundation, and has won the Sokolov Scholarship from the Breadloaf Writing Conference, the Lamar lectureship from Wesleyan College, and an Arts Administration Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other awards. In 2006, The Georgia Center for the Book selected Trouble No More as “the book All Georgia Reads,” in its common book program.

Visit the KSU faculty web site.