TG: It gave me ideas on making it a broad-based interdisciplinary program. How did those teaching experiences give you insight regarding how you wanted the MAPW program to be? THR: You played a huge role in putting this program on the map. While there, I did research for my novel, Burn the House, which is about American soldiers who left the Vietnam War and stayed in Sweden. I was the second person from KSU who won a Fulbright Scholarship in 2006, and taught in Stockholm, Sweden. It definitely shook me out of my middle-class frame of mind.

In Ghana, you are deprived in a lot of ways of the luxuries Americans have. Kennesaw gave me opportunities to teach in Ghana, Sweden, and United Arab Emirates. At the time there were 12,000 students It was closer than Athens, and given that Kennesaw wasn’t set in their ways, I felt I could develop it into something great. Bob Hill contacted me out of the blue and asked if I wanted to help with starting the MAPW Program.

I had interviewed with Macon College and UGA. TG: Well, coming out of college in 1984, there were no jobs in creative writing. THR: You have an impressive teaching background, having taught in Ghana, Sweden, United Arab Emirates and here at Kennesaw State. The book was as incredible as I anticipated, and more.Īs a fiction and nonfiction editor for The Headlight Review, I recently sat down with Kennesaw State University’s MAPW Program Director Tony Grooms to discuss his retirement and to gain insight on how he helped to make the MAPW program so successful. I had never met him but had always heard great things. Then our professor told us the book was written by the MAPW program director. Being from Birmingham, Alabama, I knew a lot about the Civil Rights Movement and the events that took place, so I was already excited to read it. One of the books on the reading list was Bombingham. When I first heard of Tony Grooms, I was in an undergrad English class at KSU several years ago. All of the professors in the program are well-versed, extremely experienced, and have helped get many students jobs, writing careers, published. The relationships are strong, and the vast opportunities that are available is astounding. It was then that I met so many students on my level. It wasn’t until 2020 that I decided to take the plunge. When I first came to KSU in 2004, I never really thought of it as a writing school, though I often thought about obtaining my master’s degree.

Bombingham by Anthony Grooms