About
Kenneth Robbins is the author of six published novels, thirty-eight published plays, numerous essays, stories, and memoirs on-line and in peer-reviewed journals, and a collection of short stories. His fiction has received the Toni Morrison Prize and the Associated Writing Programs Novel Award. His plays have been recognized by receiving the Charles Getchell Award, the Festival of Southern Theatre Award, and the Gabrielle Society Humanitarian Award. His radio plays have been aired over National Public Radio and the BBC Radio 3. He holds a PhD from Southern Illinois University and a MFA from the University of Georgia. He lives in Ruston, Louisiana, where he teaches within the Honors Program at Louisiana Tech University as Professor Emeritus Theatre within the College of Liberal Arts.
Featured Work
The City of Churches
In an unnamed Southern city in the hot summer of 1963, four girls die in a church bombing, a white merchant who impulsively takes down the Jim Crow signs in his store is harassed by segregationists, every day brings new protests and counterattacks, and a black handyman and a white cop are killed when a stick of dynamite inexplicably explodes between them. Thirty years later, the sons of these two men return to the city of their birth, one a minister, the other a writer, each seeking clues to the fathers who were literally blown from their young lives. Their journeys, and that of their fathers before them, are told in chapters that alternate between 1963, when the truth seemed obvious but unattainable, and 1993, when the barriers are down but the facts are elusive and often surprising. The novel telling these interwoven stories is a satisfying, compelling examination of race and human relations, the terrible cost of the sins of the past, and the promise of racial healing.
