Robert Lee “Rob” Penny was born in Opelika, Alabama, on August 6, 1940. Although Penny and his family moved to Pittsburgh in 1947, when he was only seven years old, the South made a permanent mark on his writing. He grew up listening to his mother sing the blues and he practiced poetry by copying down lyrics to his favorite songs. For the rest of his life, he listened to rhythm, blues, and jazz while he wrote. 

Penny grew up in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, where he began to develop the powers of observation and storytelling that would shine in the dozens of plays and hundreds of poems he produced during his lifetime. Raised Catholic, Penny attended Holy Trinity Elementary School and Central District Catholic High School, where he followed a four-year science track. Just one year after high school graduation, Penny married his lifelong partner, Betty. The growing family planned to relocate to Ohio so he could attend Central State College, but Betty became pregnant with their second child and finances were difficult. Thus Penny returned to Pittsburgh to find work. Although employed as a counselor-recruiter for the Pittsburgh Opportunities Industrialization Center (OIC), he threw himself into his greatest passions: writing and building creative community for Black writers. 

The Hill District supplied a generation of Pittsburgh African American artists – Penny included –  with a shared language, setting, and cast of characters. Soon after his return to the city, Penny co-founded the literary magazine Horn and Signal and worked as a contributing editor for Connection, a literary journal publishing Black writers from Pittsburgh and beyond. In 1965, he co-founded the Centre Avenue Poets Theatre Workshop with three other writers: August Wilson, Chawley P. Williams, and Nick Flournoy. While Wilson ultimately became the most nationally renowned of the group, he remembered Penny as a lifelong influence. Struggling to craft dialogue for his plays, Wilson asked Penny, “How do you make characters talk?” Penny answered: “You don’t. You listen to them” (Bigsby 44). Penny carried this practice of listening into his work as a writer, administrator, and teacher. 

While Penny and his colleagues were building a vibrant Black literary community, the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) was also trying to construct a Black Studies department. In 1968, administrator Jack Daniel hired Penny as one of the first faculty members. Penny never graduated college, but he had a vision for a workshop called “Black consciousness,” meant to steep young people in Black cultural values, philosophies, and lifestyles.

From the start, Penny was not only a professor but also a mentor and advocate for Black students and writers. Colleagues describe him as a soft-spoken, sweater-wearing poet, who found his greatest joy in the act of writing. At the same time, he relentlessly supported movements to build Black community and fight for greater equality at the university. During his first year as a faculty member, he supported Black students who occupied the computer center to demand better conditions for Black faculty and classmates. He joined Pitt’s Black Action Society, a group that organized activist, cultural, and social events for Black students and faculty. Although Penny preferred writing and teaching to administrative tasks, he eventually accepted a role as Chair of the Africana Studies department. In this position, Penny remained deeply dedicated to student needs. One colleague recalled, “He had a hard time saying no to students. They would come up to him wanting permission to enter his already full class, and of course he would say yes. He’d say yes so much that there weren’t enough chairs in the room” (Felt). Penny also used resources at Pitt to support Black writers. In 1976, he co-founded Kuntu Writers Workshop with fellow writers August Wilson, Frances Barnes, Maisha Baton, and Levita Williams. Until his death, Penny coordinated the workshop, which met twice a month in Pitt’s Africana Studies department. 

Penny’s career as a playwright accelerated during his time at the University of Pittsburgh. There he met another Black professor, Vernell Lillie, who, in 1974, founded the Kuntu Repertory Theatre with Penny as the first playwright-in-residence. Kuntu gave students the opportunity to view and perform in plays written and directed by Black creators. By the year 2000, Kuntu had performed seventy-three different plays; seventeen were written by Penny. His work spread beyond Pittsburgh to theaters in New York, Chicago, and other cities. Perhaps his greatest commercial success was Good Black Don’t Crack, performed at Henry Street Settlement’s New Theatre off Broadway in 1975. 

As a playwright, Penny experimented with form and content. For example, in 1995, he collaborated with researcher Lee Kiburi to conduct fieldwork on gangs in Pittsburgh. Kiburi’s interviews and notes informed Penny’s play Killin’ and Chillin’ in the Hood, a piece he hoped would spark discussion about poverty, education, unemployment, and other social issues. Influenced by playwright Amiri Baraka and Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, and Jack Kerouac, Penny’s writing hummed with the music of both the deep South and northern industrial cities.  

On March 22, 2003, Penny died suddenly of a heart attack. Until the very end, he continued writing and teaching at Pitt, collaborating with Kuntu Repertory Theatre, leading the Kuntu Writers Workshop, and attending live music shows with his wife, Betty. At the time of his death, he had three sons, twelve grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. Colleagues and family members created the Rob Penny Memorial Student Assistant Fund in his name. Two months later, in May 2003, the Kuntu Repertory Theatre posthumously performed his final play, “Difficult Days Ahead in a Blaze.” Penny’s legacy lives on in his rich trove of writings, and in the hundreds of students and writers that he mentored.