Celebrated novelist, poet and teacher Anthony Grooms will be inducted into the 2025 Georgia Writers Hall of Fame on Aug. 2, at the Athens-Clarke County Library. There, he will be in conversation from 1–3 p.m. with Madison filmmaker Jesse Freeman, talking about “When Fiction Remembers: A conversation on fiction, history, and the art of storytelling.” The event is free and open to the public, and a reception will follow the discussion.
Induction into the Hall of Fame isn’t Grooms’ first honor. During his long career, he has been a Fulbright fellow, a fellow at writer’s retreat Yaddo, a Hurston-Wright Foundation Legacy Award finalist and a National Endowment for the Arts arts administration fellow. He has also twice received the Lillian Smith Award for Fiction.
Born in Charlottesville, VA, Grooms graduated from the College of William and Mary with a bachelor of arts degree in theater and speech, focusing on playwriting. He earned a master of fine arts in English from George Mason University and began teaching, first at what was then Macon Junior College (now Middle Georgia State University). He had met Morgan County native Raymond Andrews before moving to Georgia, and the two reconnected.
“I ventured to Athens where Ray had settled, and we became close friends,” Grooms said. He and his wife moved to Atlanta, and he began teaching at Clark College, now Clark Atlanta University. Recruited to the creative writing program at the University of Georgia, he spent five years commuting to Athens, where he became friends with Jim Kilgo, Coleman Barks and Judith Cofer, whom he had also met in Macon.
In 1995 Grooms was recruited by Kennesaw State University, where the dynamic Betty Siegal was president. While UGA had a master’s program in writing, Kennesaw was creating one called the Masters in Professional Writing (MAPW), in which Grooms taught for 26 years. From 2018 until he retired, he directed the program. It’s interdisciplinary, with students choosing from a wide array of writing, including rhetoric and composition, applied writing and creative writing. Grooms taught playwriting and poetry writing, but his primary focus was fiction writing.
At Kennesaw, “if you had an idea, the attitude was, ‘No, we don’t have money for that, but get it done.’ The school was growing and expanding—there was an exciting atmosphere,” he said. With her signature red glasses, Siegal would come into the faculty dining room and sit with the faculty and just talk, Grooms said. He didn’t know if the UGA president would have been so approachable.
Grooms partnered with faculty in American Studies and created a popular course in civil rights literature. One of his students worked with another professor to create an oral history of the Atlanta movement. In his course, the students read poems, stories and documents from the era, including an application to join the KKK, as well as speeches by George Wallace and Martin Luther King, Jr., and song lyrics.
By 2001, it had taken 18 months for Grooms’ novel, Bombingham, to appear. His publisher, the Free Press, planned a book tour after the Oct. 1 release date—possibly the worst time for a new book to launch, with the country still in shock over the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The book was well-received, but “I remember empty airports and being on a plane with one other passenger,” Grooms said. It was not the reception anyone would want. But, Bombingham has been in print for 24 years, now offered by Random House.
His book Trouble No More, like Bombingham, also explores identity and race relations in the South. Both books received the Lillian Smith Award.
Since his retirement from Kennesaw State in 2022, Grooms has continued to write and post older stories published decades ago on Substack, as well as new poems and stories. He’s trying to place two novels, one of which is for middle grade readers.
Two other well-known authors are also included among the 2025 Georgia Writers Hall of Fame honorees: novelist and Macon native Tina McElroy Ansa, who died in 2024, and journalist Deborah Blum, whose tenure as director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT ends on July 31.
Ansa wrote several novels, including Baby of the Family and Ugly Ways. She also started DownSouth Press to showcase Black writers and helped create the Sea Island Writers Retreat, held in Georgia and in other states. She twice received the Georgia Authors Series Award, and also was given the prestigious Stanley W. Lindberg Award. There was a celebration of her life and many achievements in Atlanta earlier this year.
The daughter of UGA entomologist Murray Blum and UGA publications specialist Ann Blum, Deborah Blum grew up mostly in Athens and graduated from the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communications. She later earned a master’s in science writing from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. As a staff writer at the Sacramento Bee, she received a Pulitzer Prize for “The Monkey Wars,” a series of stories about using animals in research, which became her first book.
Other works include The Poisoner’s Handbook in 2010, focusing on nescient forensic science, and The Poison Squad in 2018, which tells the story of USDA chemist Harvey Wiley’s fight to make food safe for Americans. Both books have become PBS shows.
Blum will be coming to Athens for her induction on Sept. 23, when she will participate in a panel discussion for UGA’s annual Food, Power and Politics lecture.
Like what you just read? Support Flagpole by making a donation today. Every dollar you give helps fund our ongoing mission to provide Athens with quality, independent journalism.
