A native of Memphis, Tennessee, Flowers fought in the Vietnam War before launching his literary career in New York City, where he was an executive director of the Harlem Writers Guild.
He enrolled in writing workshops with John Oliver Killens, an influential figure in the Black Arts Movement, whom Flowers came to regard as his mentor.
[6] Later, Flowers was a founding member, along with Doris Jean Austin and others, of the New Renaissance Writers Guild, a nonprofit organization based in New York City.
Entitled De Mojo Blues, it follows three African-American soldiers who, after being dishonorably discharged from their service in the Vietnam War, attempt to adjust to civilian life in the United States.
It details the romance between a hoodoo practitioner and a blues musician as they travel from Arkansas to Tennessee during the period known as the Great Migration.
[11] Writing in The New York Times, Fran Handman called it a "charming, provocative novel" that contained "flashes of painful insight".
[12] In 1996, Flowers joined the faculty of Syracuse University, teaching in the Department of English's Creative Writing Program.
[15] His work tends to open with a self-referential invocation, highlighting his interest in both oral storytelling tradition and hoodoo spiritualism.
The scholar Keith Gilyard has argued that Flowers, in De Mojo Blues, demonstrates that "the value of language skill" is of prime importance to the development of African-American culture, extending a theme that has run through much of African American fiction.
Schroeder points to Another Good Loving Blues as an example of Flowers's interest in connections to history and community, both through his conception of his characters and through the novel's structure, which she compares to a traditional call-and-response song.
[21] By investing these traditions and places with spiritual importance, Flowers's work stresses the need for their preservation and cultivation through social and political participation.