The writer. . .

Robert Lamb was born in Aiken, S.C., grew up in Augusta, Ga., and is a graduate of the University of Georgia. After several years of newspaper work, last at The Atlanta Constitution, he began teaching, first at Clemson University and then at the University of South Carolina. At Carolina since 1990, he has taught writing courses in the English Department, the School of Journalism, and the South Carolina Honors College. He has published free-lance articles in various magazines and newspapers, and does free-lance reporting for The New York Times and Dow Jones. In 1991 Lamb published his first novel, Striking Out, a coming-of-age story set in Augusta. Striking Out was nominated for the PEN/Hemingway Award, a coveted prize for first novels. In 1998 he published a volume of fiction by his students titled The Class Menagerie - A Collection of Short Stories Out of USC. The book, co-edited by Lamb and Chris Horn, a USC editor, is used in Lamb's fiction-writing classes. A second volume, The Class Menagerie II, was published in 2006. Lamb's latest published novel, Atlanta Blues, was launched at the Georgia Center for the Book in September 2004. A month later, it showed up on the local best-seller list in The (Columbia, S.C.) State newspaper, and at year's end another South Carolina daily newspaper (The Sumter Item) named Atlanta Blues "One of the Three Best Novels of the Year (2004) by a Southern Writer-- and maybe the best"). The novel was nominated for the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. Set in 1981, Atlanta Blues is about the search for a missing girl by a reporter and two cops. The trail leads through the underbelly of urban Atlanta to murder and heartbreak. Lamb has also published short stories and poetry in various magazines, including The Georgia Review and Ep;phany, A Literary Journal, and one his short stories, titled "R.I.P," was a winner in the 2009 South Carolina Fiction Project. Lamb is a member of the Southern Book Critics Circle, and has reviewed novels for SouthernScribe.com, The State newspaper, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the New York Journal of Books. He lives in Columbia, S.C., with his wife Margaret and sons Tyler and Carson. He has two other sons, David and Clay, who live in Atlanta. The author may be reached at robertlamb@myway.com * * * A Word of Thanks: Writing is a solitary occupation, but the fortunate writer does not go it alone. In writing both Atlanta Blues and Striking Out, as well as in editing and publishing The Class Menagerie, both I and II, and in writing since then, I've been especially fortunate to have the support and encouragement of friends like Karen Petit, Marshall Swanson, Rick Layman, Chris Horn, Bond Nickles, David Baker, Bobby and Mary Woodward and their daughter Beth Woodward, Dave Osier, Beau Cutts, Bill Starr, Rick Layman, Naomi Williams, Buster Sheahan, Dorothy Jones, Jim Koffman, Bert Goolsby, my late mother and father, my late cousin Barbara Jean Rowley, the late Lenny and Jeannie Perry, and scores of my students at the University of South Carolina who urged me to "keep going" on the story, whatever it was at the time. Not least, I thank my wife Margaret and our two sons, Tyler and Carson, all of whom bear heroically the stigma of having, respectively, a husband and father who writes. -- Robert Lamb