Anthony Grooms is the author of Bombingham: A Novel and Trouble No More: Stories, both winners of the Lillian Smith Book Award for fiction. Born in Charlottesville, Virginia, he has taught writing and American literature at universities in Ghana and Sweden and, since 1994, at Kennesaw State University in Georgia.Grooms's latest novel is The Vain Conversation.
From his Q&A with Margaret Evans for Lowcountry Weekly:
You’ve written a novel based on a “true story” – the murder of four people in 1940s rural Georgia. How did you come across this story and what about it captured your imagination?Visit Anthony Grooms's website.
I first learned of the story of the Moore’s Ford Bridge lynching from a news article in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution in 1991. The article was about Clinton Adams, who claimed to have witnessed, as a 10-year old, the murder of two black couples by local white people, including the police. What interested me about the story was that Adams, a white man, had kept the story a secret for over 40 years, and for all those years what he saw had tormented him. He was a witness who, until the article, had no means to tell his story. Even now, as he has been in the news recently since the FBI has closed the investigation into the case, he talks about his witnessing as...[read on]
Writers Read: Anthony Grooms.
My Book, The Movie: The Vain Conversation.
The Page 69 Test: The Vain Conversation.
--Marshal Zeringue