Writers | African American Writers | Roundtable

“For me,” says novelist Ravi Howard, “my race or my culture is very much a foundation.” The award-winning author of Like Trees, Walking adds, “But from there, black writers can branch into any genre. “

“Black writers aren’t just protest writers and social realists anymore,” adds Anthony Grooms, another novelist at the Writers’ roundtable. “They can write anything they want.”

Their comments come in response to a question from Dedra Johnson, also a novelist and the third guest.  She wondered if African American writers have a new way of looking at themselves.

Gene Edwards hosts this fascinating hour of conversation with three contemporary African American authors. Ravi Howard won the Hurston Wright Award for Like Trees, Walking, the story of the last lynching in Alabama. Anthony Grooms’ novel Bombingham, set in Birmingham in the early 1960s, won the Lillian Smith Prize for Fiction.  And Dedra Johnson was a finalist for the 2006 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Award for Sandrine’s Letter to Tomorrow, set in New Orleans.

In addition to being African American, these authors have much in common. They’re southern;  they have protagonists who come of age; and they have turned to their lives as sources for their stories. “I knew many Sandrines growing up in my neighborhood,” remembers Johnson. “It was also based on some things I had heard about adults just not taking care of children.”

Grooms married into a large Alabama family. “I heard stories about the time of the civil rights movement,” he relates, “told in the vernacular of people who had experienced it. And my wife told me stories, too.” 

Howard’s story happened in a place where he, too, had family—Mobile. “I had a very different relationship with the town than the people who lived during this episode, and I think that might be true for a lot of people of my generation.”  He continues, “I just wanted to explore something that happened before I was really at an age where I could comprehend it.”

“Are you African American writers or are you southern writers,” asks host Gene Edwards. “Or have we gotten to the place where you don’t have to place yourself anymore?”  “You’re placed by others, and that’s a reality you have to deal with even if you want to say ‘I am just a writer. I am simply human,’” Johnson responds. “I certainly see myself as an African American writer. Whether I write solely about the African American experience is up to me. It’s a choice, not an obligation.”

Then she continues. “I understand why there’s all this placement and why there’s the African American section, though I think what that kind of says to people is ‘Well, this is that black stuff over here. Don’t worry about that. You’ve got the rest of the store.’”

“I don’t strongly object to the idea of having an African American novel section,” counters Grooms. “It does create, I think, a certain focus on that particular cultural entity. I think it’s a good marketing strategy and southern writers have been doing it for a long time.”

 “I think that sometimes the shelf space becomes very limited,” Howard expands. “We might be mixed in with everything that is classic, everything that is contemporary. So for those of us who might have a first or second book out, we might not have as much play as we want.”

And when it comes to writing about race, he cites Harper Lee, Eudora Welty, and William Faulkner as “southern white writers who’ve taken up race in their work. I think there are so many other writers who might want to take that up in their conversation but might also want to write other things. So I think it’s wonderful to see that kind of mix.”