Robert Lamb

Robert Lamb teaches writing and American literature at the University of South Carolina, in Columbia, and has published two novels: Striking Out, a coming-of-age novel set in Georgia in the 1950s, and Atlanta Blues, set in 1981, about the search for a missing girl by a reporter and two cops.

Striking Out was nominated for the PEN/Hemingway Award, a coveted prize for first novels. Still in print, it is available at www.thepermanentpress.com and www.amazon.com.

Atlanta Blues was nominated for the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, made the best-seller list in Columbia, and was selected by a daily South Carolina newspaper as "One of The Three Best Novels of the Year (2004) by a Southern Writer — and maybe the best."

Born in South Carolina, Robert grew up in Georgia and is a graduate of the University of Georgia. He began teaching after several years in journalism (last at The Atlanta Constitution), teaching first at Clemson University, Clemson, S.C., and then moving to USC in 1991, where he teaches courses in the English Department, the School of Journalism, and the South Carolina Honors College. Mr. Lamb has published free-lance articles in various magazines and newspapers, and he is a free-lance reporter for The New York Times.

He says that he feels a kinship with anybody who tries to write for publication. In that vein, in 1998 Lamb formed Red Letter Press and published a volume of fiction by his students: The Class Menagerie - A Collection of Short Stories Out of USC, co-edited by Robert and Chris Horn, a USC editor, and which he uses in his fiction-writing classes. He published a second volume of student fiction in 2004: The Class Menagerie II, with Dr. Charles (Chuck) Curran as his co-editor. Then, in 2006, Red Letter Press began publishing writers besides Lamb's students. For more information on this, go to http://redletterpress.googlepages.com.

A member of the Southern Book Critics Circle, he has reviewed books for SouthernScribe.com and for The (Columbia, S.C.) State newspaper. He lives in Columbia, SC.