Anthony Grooms

Anthony Grooms reads from his newest novel, The Vain Conversation, a finalist for the 2020 Townsend Prize for Fiction. In part one of this show produced from a presentation at the Kansas City Public Library called “On Writing, On Race” Grooms, a two-time Lillian Smith Prize Recipient, sat down with fellow novelist, Whitney Terrell for his Writers at Work series to talk about the importance of writing about race in America. The two discuss the novel, based on a 1946 lynching of two black couples in Georgia, and how it’s told from the viewpoints of characters white and black, offering a complicated and nuanced story of our humanity. You can also hear a 2003 conversation with Anthony Grooms about his first novel, Bombingham in our audio archive.