Children Bob Moses Led, The

WILLIAM HEATH has a PhD in American studies from Case Western Reserve University and has taught at Kenyon, Transylvania, Vassar, and the University of Seville. In 2007 he retired as a professor emeritus at Mount Saint Mary’s University, where The William Heath Award in creative writing is given annually. The Children Bob Moses Led (Milkweed Editions 1995) won the Hackney Literary Award for best novel, was nominated by the publisher for the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize, and nominated by Joyce Carol Oates for the Ainsfield-Wolf Award. In 2002 Time magazine online judged it one of the eleven best novels of the African American experience. Blacksnake’s Path: The True Adventures of William Wells (Heritage Books, 2008) was a History Book Club selection. Devil Dancer (Somondoco Press 2013) is a neo-noir novel set in Lexington, Kentucky. A work of history, William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest, will be published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2015. The Walking Man (Icarcus Books 1994) is a selection of his poems. He has published essays on Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, William Styron, and Thomas Berger, among others. He and his wife Roser Caminals-Heath, a Catalan novelist, have lived in Frederick, Maryland since 1981. A study guide for The Children Bob Moses Led is available at newsouthbooks.com/bobmoses/bob_moses_study_guide.pdf.

The large cast of characters gives voice to the complexity of the era's issues, and Heath's clear chronicle of this poignant moment in our nation's recent past is often compelling.