Fenton Johnson
- (520) 621-1836
- MODERN LANGUAGE, Rm. 445
- TUCSON, AZ 85721-0067
- fjohnson@arizona.edu
Biography
Fenton Johnson was born ninth of nine children into a Kentucky bourbon-making family of storytellers and named after the Trappist monks who hung out in his mother’s kitchen. In 2017 he received the Bruckheimer Award for best Kentucky literature in the previous year, for his new and selected essay collection Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays (Sarbande). His latest novel, The Man Who Loved Birds, was published by the University Press of Kentucky (UPK) in March 2016. UPK simultaneously reissued his previous novels Crossing the River and Scissors, Paper, Rock, with forewords by nationally prominent authors Silas House (for Crossing the River) and Pam Houston (for Scissors, Paper, Rock). Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays was published by Sarabande Books in May 2017 to excellent reviews.
Johnson is also the author of Keeping Faith: A Skeptic's Journey among Christian and Buddhist Monks, which addresses what it means to a skeptic to have and to keep faith. Keeping Faith received a Lambda Literary Award for best gay/lesbian nonfiction as well as a Kentucky Literary Award for creative nonfiction / outstanding literary achievement. His Geography ofthe Heart: A Memoir received the American Library Association and Lambda Literary Awards for best gay nonfiction. Scissors, Paper, Rock was nominated for the San Francisco Bay Area Book Reviewers Award and the Boston Review Fisk Award for best fiction.
Johnson has published essays and literary journalism in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and a wide range of newspapers and magazines on issues involving social justice, faith and spirituality, environmentalism, and human rights. Going It Alone: The Dignity and Challenge of Solitude, published as a cover essay / Folio of Harper’s April 2015 issue, will be adapted into a book-length meditation on solitude and solitaries, At the Center of All Beauty: The Dignity and Challenge of Solitude, to be published by W.W. Norton in 2018. Going It Alone was the subject of an interview on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air: http://www.npr.org/2015/03/12/392564716/inspired-by-monks-a-writer-embraces-his-life-of-solitude. Harper's Magazine published his most recent cover essay--The Future of Queer: A Manifesto--in January, 2018.
Johnson has received National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowships in fiction and creative nonfiction, an Arizona Arts Council award, a Stegner Fellowship in fiction from Stanford University, and a Michener Fellowship from the Iowa Writers Workshop. He has an active career in writing narration for independent media, including radio, documentaries, and personal films. He has contributed commentaries to National Public Radio and wrote the narration for award-winning documentaries, among them Lourdes Portillo's La Ofrenda: Days of the Dead and the southeast Appalachian cultural center Appalshop's Stranger with a Camera, recipient of a Columbia DuPont Award in journalism and best documentary at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. 2017 saw the appearance of UA colleague Dr. Beverly Seckinger's Hippie Family Values, for which Johnson was a script and editing consultant.
Johnson has taught in the creative writing programs at San Francisco State University, Columbia University, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, and the University of California-Davis. Currently he is professor of Creative Writing at the University of Arizona and serves on the faculty of Spalding University’s low-residency MFA Program. He is regularly invited to teach at creative writing workshops around the country, including in 2017 Tomales Bay, CA (with Cheryl Strayed, Luis Urrea, Garth Greenwell, and Pam Houston) and the Hindman Settlement School, serving underserved writers of Appalachia.
###
Degrees
- M.F.A. Creative Writing-Fiction
- University of Iowa Writers Workshop, Iowa City, Iowa
- Under Strang Knob, a collection of stories
Work Experience
- University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona (2000 - Ongoing)
Awards
- Writer-in-residence
- I.A.U., Institut Americain Universitaire, Aix-en-Provence, France, Fall 2018
- Linda Bruckheimer Kentucky Writers Series
- Sarabande Press, Spring 2017
- Honorable Mention, Best Essays of 2015
- Houghton Harcourt, publishers of Best Essays of 2015, Fall 2015 (Award Finalist)
- Denny Plattner Award
- Appalachian Heritage Magazine, Spring 2015
Interests
Teaching
Creative nonfiction; Fiction; Contemplative Life / Practice; Spirituality; LGBT Studies/Literature; contemporary culture.
Research
Same as above.
Courses
2018-19 Courses
-
Independent Study
ENGL 599 (Spring 2019) -
Studies in Genres
ENGL 310 (Spring 2019) -
Topics LGBTQQC Texts
ENGL 351B (Spring 2019)
2017-18 Courses
-
Independent Study
ENGL 599 (Spring 2018) -
Inter Fiction Writing
ENGL 304 (Spring 2018) -
LIT of Interior Journey
ENGL 474 (Spring 2018) -
Adv Crtv Non-Fict Writ
ENGL 401 (Fall 2017) -
Modern Literature
ENGL 596H (Fall 2017)
2016-17 Courses
-
Adv Crtv Non-Fict Writ
ENGL 501 (Spring 2017) -
Auth,Period,Genres+Theme
ENGL 496A (Spring 2017)
2015-16 Courses
-
Advanced Fiction Writing
ENGL 404 (Spring 2016) -
Independent Study
ENGL 599 (Spring 2016) -
Lit & Major Philosophical Trad
ENGL 470 (Spring 2016)
Scholarly Contributions
Books
- Johnson, J. F. (2017). Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays. Louisville, KY: Sarabande Books.More infoPart retrospective, part memoir, Fenton Johnson's collection Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays explores sexuality, religion, geography, the AIDS crisis, and more. Johnson's wanderings take him from the hills of Kentucky to those of San Francisco, from the streets of Paris to the sidewalks of Calcutta. Along the way, he investigates questions large and small: What's the relationship between artists and museums, illuminated in a New Guinean display of shrunken heads? What's the difference between empiricism and intuition?The collection combines new, unpublished essays with work that originally appeared in Harper's, The New York Times, All Things Considered and elsewhere. Johnson reports from the front lines of the AIDS epidemic, from Burning Man, from monasteries near and far. His subject matter ranges from Oscar Wilde to censorship in journalism to Kentucky basketball.Everywhere Home is the latest title in Sarabande's Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature.
- Johnson, J. F. (2016). Crossing the River, reissued with foreword by Silas House and a new afterword by the author. Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky.More infoIn an unprecedented commitment to a native son author, the University Press of Kentucky is re-issuing my two previous novels, Crossing the River and Scissors, Paper, Rock, at the same time as publishing my new novel, The Man Who Loved Birds. Crossing the River was first published by Birch Lane Press (New York, NY) in 1989, and issued by Bantam/Dell in paperback in 1990. Bestselling author and Appalachian activist Silas House is contributing a foreword to the reissue, and I will contribute an afterword.
- Johnson, J. F. (2016). Scissors, Paper, Rock, reissued with a foreword by Pam Houston and a new afterword by the author. Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky.More infoIn an unprecedented commitment to a native son author, University Press of Kentucky is re-issuing my previous novels, Crossing the River and Scissors, Paper, Rock simultaneously with publishing my new novel The Man Who Loved Birds. All three will appear in March 2016. Scissors, Paper, Rock was first published in hardcover by Simon & Schuster in 1993 and issued in paperback by Washington Square in 1994. It received a Lambda Literary Award for best GLBT fiction and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award for the best fiction published by a Bay Area author. It was also nominated for the Boston Review Fisk Award for best fiction. Author and UC Davis Creative Writing Program director Pam Houston has contributed a foreword, and I have written an afterword for the reissue.
Journals/Publications
- Johnson, J. F. (2018). Conversation with bell hooks and Fenton Johnson. Appalachian Heritage.More infoModerated by Appalachian Heritage editor Jason Howard, "A Conversation with bell hooks and Fenton Johnson" took place 12 April, 2018, in the Loyal Jones Appalachian Studies Center at Berea College, Berea Kentucky. An edited version was published in the Summer, 2018 edition of Appalachian Heritage.
- Johnson, J. F. (2018). The Future of Queer: A Manifesto. Harper's Magazine, cover essay.More info20 pp essay (in ms.), researched in 2017, published in January 2018, so I leave to the committee to decide how to categorize it. The first half establishes state-sanctioned marriage as the "very mortar of the bricks of the wall of convention that separates us from ourselves, from one another, from all that is strange, unfamiliar, challenging, and thus from learning and growth." The second half is a scathing, or so I hope, critique of unfettered capitalism.
- Johnson, J. F. (2018). The Future of Queer: A Manifesto. Harper's Magazine.More infoWork largely completed in 2017, but the essay was published as the cover essay in January 2018, so I include it in my 2018 report.
Presentations
- Matuk, F., Johnson, J. F., Bedoya, R., & Lee, T. (2015, January). Recitation of works by Thomas Merton. Merton 100: 1915-2015. University of Arizona Poetry Center, Tucson, AZ: College of Humanities Religious Studies Program, University of Arizona.
Others
- Johnson, J. F. (2017, October). Hippie Family Values. documentary film, distributed by New Day Films.More infoIn 2017 UA Professor of Media Studies Dr Beverly Seckinger released her film "Hippie Family Values," profiling an intentional community founded in the early 1970s west of Silver City, NM. I worked with Dr. Seckinger throughout the production as narration and editing consultant. I don't see a category below that adequately reflects my role, which I'd describe as "consultant."
- Johnson, J. F. (2016, December). Letter to America. Terrain. http://www.terrain.org/2016/guest-editorial/letter-to-america-johnson/More infoPart of Terrain's series of letters by authors responding to the 2016 presidential election.
- Johnson, J. F. (2015, April). Going It Alone: The Dignity and Challenge of Solitude. Harper's Magazine (Folio, i.e., centerpiece, and cover essay). http://www.fentonjohnson.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Dignity-and-Challenge-of-Solitude-Harpers-April-2015.pdfMore infoCover and Folio essay, April 2015, Harper's Magazine.
