John Fenton Johnson is an American writer and professor of English and LGBT Studies[1] at the University of Arizona.[2]
Life
Johnson was born the youngest of nine children in south-central Kentucky to a father who worked as a distiller. At 17 Jonson won a full scholarship to Stanford University where he graduated in 1975 with a B.A. in English. He would go on to earn an M.F.A in creative writing from the Iowa Writers Workshop.[3]
In February 2016, University Press of Kentucky marked Fenton Johnson's place in the literature of the state, region, and nation by publishing a new novel, The Man Who Loved Birds, at the same time that it reissues his earlier novels Crossing the River and Scissors, Paper, Rock. Johnson is also the author of three cover essays in Harper's Magazine, most recently (April, 2015) Going It Alone: The Dignity and Challenge of Solitude, available for reading through his webpage. Links to his media appearances, on Terry Gross's Fresh Air and on Kentucky Educational Television, may be found on his webpage.
His most recent nonfiction book Keeping Faith: A Skeptic's Journey draws on time spent living as a member of the monastic communities of the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky and the San Francisco Zen Center as a means to examining what it means to a skeptic to have and keep faith. Keeping Faith weaves frank conversations with Trappist and Buddhist monks with a history of the contemplative life and meditations from Johnson's experience of the virtue we call faith. It received the 2004 Kentucky Literary Award for Nonfiction and the 2004 Lambda Literary Award for best LGBT creative nonfiction.
Johnson is also the author of Geography of the Heart: A Memoir(1996) which received a Lambda Literary Award and the American Library Association Award for best gay/lesbian nonfiction.
Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays, a compilation of Johnson's new and selected essays, will be published in 2017. He is currently at work on At the Center of All Beauty: The Dignity and Challenge of Solitude, a book-length meditation based on his 2016 cover essay in Harper's Magazine.
