Anthony Grooms

Anthony Grooms, originally from Louisa, Virginia, has written several pieces of literature and has won many awards for his writings. Grooms is now a professor at Kennesaw State University, near Atlanta, Georgia, and teaches creative writing and other English courses.

Biography Anthony “Tony” Grooms was born January 15, 1955, and grew up in Louisa, Virginia. He is the oldest of six children in his African-American family, which also has Native American and European backgrounds. His parents, Robert E. Grooms and Dellaphine Scott, promoted education, so Grooms became a part of the Freedom of Choice plan. He attended a white public school in 1967 consisting of partial integration, and his experience there has had a significant influence on his writing. Grooms has always been a writer, but he never considered himself one until graduate school.

Literary works Anthony Grooms is an author of published writings covering a variety of subjects, but his best-known piece of literature, Bombingham, is a novel addressing issues faced during the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Other works of writing include Ice Poems, an assortment of poems, and Trouble No More, an assortment of short stories. His stories and poems have appeared in leading literary journals including Callaloo, African American Review, and Crab Orchard Review.

Mr. Grooms also wrote about his relationship with Pat Conroy in “The World Is Wider Than the Water It Holds” pp 248–252, Our Prince of Scribes, edited by Nicole Seitz and Jonathan Haupt, University of Georgia Press, 2018.