Writing in MELUS, a critical journal of multi-ethnic literature, Professor Diptiranjan Pattanaik said that Trouble No More demonstrates “the insider’s profound knowledge of the history and struggles of African Americans, while consistently managing to circumscribe a breadth of understanding with a tender story-telling art.” Reviewing Bombingham for the Washington Post, critic Jabari Asim wrote, "In its insistence that 'the world is a tumultuous place and every soul in it suffers,' this powerful, resonant novel offers no consolations. His stories and poems have been published in Callaloo, African American Review, Crab Orchard Review, and other literary journals and anthologies. He is the author of Ice Poems, Trouble No More: Stories and Bombingham, a novel.
His education at the College of William and Mary and George Mason University led him to a teaching career in Georgia, where since 1995, he has taught creative writing and literature at Kennesaw State University, and directs its M.
And for Walter, the war was just beginning.Īnthony Grooms grew up in rural Virginia. In the streets of Birmingham, ordinary citizens risked their lives to change America. From a tortured past lingered questions of faith, and a terrible family crisis found its climax as the city did the same. As the great movement swelled around them, the Burkes faced tremendous obstacles of their own. Their paper route never took them to the white areas of town.
Walter and Lamar were always aware of the terms of segregation-the horrendous rules and stifling reality. The juxtaposition is so powerful-between war-torn Vietnam and terror-filled “Bombingham”-that he is drawn back to the summer that would see his transition from childish wonder at the world to his certain knowledge of his place in it.
But all he can think of is his childhood friend Lamar, the friend with whom he first experienced the fury of violence, on the streets of Birmingham, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. In his barracks, Walter Burke is trying to write a letter to the parents of a fallen soldier, an Alabama man who died in a muddy rice paddy.
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