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harles Johnson is the
author of four novels Faith and the Good Thing (1974), Oxherding Tale
(1982), Middle Passage (1990), and Dreamer (Scribner, l998);
two collection of short stories, The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1986)
and Soulcatcher and Other Stories (2001); a work of
aesthetics, |
Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970 (1988); two
collections of comic art, Black Humor (1970) and Half-Past Nation Time
(1972); Black Men Speaking (1997), co-edited with John McCluskey
Jr.; Africans in America: America's Journey through Slavery, the
companion book for PBS' series (Oct., l998), co-authored with Patricia Smith
(The Audio Book for this was selected as one of the best audio books in the
History category of the Listen Up Awards in Publisher's Weekly); and
King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King Jr., (Viking Studio, 2000),
co-authored with Bob Adelman. These works have been translated into eight
foreign languages. As a cartoonist and journalist in the early 1970s, he
published over 1000 drawings in national publications, a selection of which
appears in Humor Me: An Anthology of Humor by Writers of Color by John
McNally (University of Iowa, 2002). In l999 Indiana University Press published
a collection of his essays on aesthetics, cultural criticism, articles,
interviews, speeches, cartoons, out-takes from his novels and book reviews
dating back to 1965, entitled, I Call Myself an Artist: Writings By and About
Charles Johnson (April, l999) a "Charles Johnson reader," edited by
Dr. Rudolph Byrd, with a final section of eight critical articles on his work.
Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing (Scribner) was
published in 2003. The University of Washington Press published Passing the
Three Gates: Interviews with Charles Johnson, edited by Dr. James
McWilliams, a collection of interviews dating back to 1978, in 2004. In 2005,
Scribner published a new edition of Oxherding Tale and his third story
collection, Dr. King’s Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories. In 2007,
Johnson co-authored with Bob Adelman Mine Eyes Have Seen: Bearing Witness to
the Struggle for Civil Rights (Time-Life Books), and his comic art appeared
in The Writer’s Brush: Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture by Writers,
edited by Donald Friedman.
Johnson, a Ph.D. in
Philosophy, l998 MacArthur fellow and 2002 recipient of an American Academy of
Arts and Letters Award for Literature, received the 1990 National Book Award
for Middle Passage (he was the first African-American male to win this
prize since Ralph Ellison in 1953). Oxherding Tale was awarded the 1983
Washington State Govenor's Award for Literature; Sorcerer's Apprentice
was one of five finalists for the 1987 PEN/Faulkner Award, and Being and
Race won a 1989 Govenor's Award for Literature. His short fiction is
included in the O'Henry Prize Stories (1993), Best American Short Stories
(1992), Best American Short Stories of the Eighties, and he was named in a
survey conducted by the University of Southern California to be one of the ten
best short story writers in America; and his short fiction and essays are much
anthologized. On May 24, 2000 he received the "Lifetime Achievement in the Arts
Award" from the Corporate Council for the Arts (former recipients include
artists Jacob Lawrence and George Tsutakawa). On July 27, 2001 he received the
Pacific Northwest Writers Association’s 2001 Achievement Award “for
distinguished professional achievement and for enhancing the stature of
Northwest literature,” and on March 27, 2003 he received one of the first
Distinguished Alumni Awards from Evanston Township High School. The spring issue
of Washington Law and Politics” includes Dr. Johnson in its feature, “The
25 Smartest People in Washington State.” In 2003, he was elected to membership
in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences; and in 2004 received the Stephen
Henderson Award for outstanding contributions to African American literature and
culture at the spring conference for the American Literature Association.
He has written over 20
screenplays, among them "Booker" (Wonderworks, 1985), which received the
international Prix Jeunesse Award, a 1985 Writers Guild Award for "outstanding
script in the television category of children's shows," and was released for
home-video in 1996 by Bonneville Worldwide Entertainment. That show, along with
"Charlie Smith and the Fritter Tree" (Visions, PBS, 1978), have been
broadcast on the Disney channel. He was one of two writer-producers for "Up and
Coming" (KCET, 1981), and earlier created, hosted, and co-produced "Charlie's
Pad" (1970), a PBS how-to-draw series that ran nationally for a decade in the
U.S. and Canada; and he hosted the 1992 KCTS (Seattle) series "Words with
Writers." In January, 2000 the BBC broadcast a two week, l0-part radio
adaptation of his novel Dreamer
He has published 51 reviews
in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The
Washington Post as well as other major newspapers in America and England and
published numerous critical articles, among them the introduction for the
commemorative edition of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and the preface
for his Juneteenth. Dr. Johnson drew a regular feature "LitCrits" for
Quarterly Black Review and his comic art has appeared in Literal Latte,
Buddha Laughing, The Seattle Times and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer.;
he also drew in 1999 a twice-monthly cartoon feature for Black Issues in
Higher Education. Dr. Johnson has served as a fiction judge for the
Pulitzer Prize (twice), National Book Award(twice) , PEN/Faulkner, Los Angeles
Times Book Prize, the Drue Heinz, numerous other fiction prizes and for the
Seattle Film Festival, is a nominator for the MacArthur fellowships, serves on
the Modern Library editorial board, and is a contributing editor for
Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. He was the 1999 chair of the fiction judges
for the National Book Awards, is a trustee for the Washington Commission for the
Humanities and served as a board member for the Seattle Repertory Theater. He
has served on the board for the Associated Writing Programs, directed their
annual short fiction contest, and was director of the Northwest office for the
Fiction Collective. In 1995 his novel Faith and the Good Thing was
performed as a play by City Lit Theatre and the Chicago Theatre Company, and
received two Black Theatre Alliance awards. Recent works include the article "A
Sangha By Another Name" in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review; the
introductory essay for Mark Twain's What is Man? (Oxford Twain series);
the introduction for Jean Toomer's Essentials; an article on Martin
Luther King Jr. for CommonQuest, which has been selected by the U.S.
Information Agency for its website; short fiction in Susan Shreve's Outside
the Law (Beacon, fall 1997); the introductory essay for Still I Rise,
a cartoon history of black America (Norton, fall 1997); the introductory essay
"On the Nature of Tales" for the Book-of-the-Month Club's A Treasury of North
American Folk Tales; the introduction for Canongate's Proverbs in the
"Pocket Canon" series published in the UK; the introduction for the two-volume
collection of classic slave narratives I Call Myself a Slave (Lawrence
Hill, l999); the literary obituary for Eldridge Cleaver published in The New
York Times Magazine and an article on the Negro National Anthem for The
New York Times' "Arts and Leisure" section; an essay on meditation and
writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education; and a critical
appreciation of Ralph Ellison in The Crisis, the official publication of
the NAACP (March/April, 2002). He appeared on Bill Moyers' Genesis
series (Oct., 1996). And has granted 282 interviews for American and foreign
newspapers, scholarly journals, radio, and television, and for Nigeria, South
Africa, Singapore, Bombay, and Amman, Jordan via USIA.
Dr. Johnson is one of l2
authors portrayed in a special series of stamps issued in November, l997 by the
Inter-Governmental Philatelic Corporation; these stamps, created to honor the
most influential black authors of the 20th century, will be distributed in the
former Soviet Union, Asia, Africa, and South America. He has received both a
National Endowment for the Arts grant (l979) and a Guggenheim Fellowship
(l986).His novel Dreamer was a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection
and a Quality Paperback Book Club alternate selection.
Dr. Johnson has lectured in
9 countries (Eastern Europe, Asia, Spain and Portugal) for the US Information
Agency and is a regular speaker at American campuses. He has delivered 332
lectures, readings, and addresses. In l997 Dr. Jonathan Little's (Alverno
College) critical study Charles Johnson's Spiritual Imagination was
published by the University of Missouri Press. William Nash at Middlebury
College published Charles Johnson’s Fiction, in 2002 (University of
Illinois Press). Gary Storhoff’s Understanding Charles Johnson
(University of South Carolina Press) appeared in 2004. In 2005, Dr. Rudolph Byrd
published Charles Johnson’s Novels: Making the American Palimpsest
(Indiana University Press). In 2007, Charles Johnson: The Novelist As
Philosophy was published by University Press of Mississippi, edited by Marc
C. Conner and William R. Nash. African-American Review devoted its winter
1996 issue to Dr. Johnson's work, which has also been the subject of two special
sessions of the Modern Language Association (1991 and 1996), and the
International Association for Philosophy and Literature (2000 and 2001). The
first meeting of the Charles Johnson Literary Society was held on May 24, 2003
at the American Literature Association conference. (May 22-25, 2003).
A former director
of the creative writing program at the University of Washington, he holds an
endowed chair, the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Professorship for Excellence
in English (the first chair in writing at UW), and currently teaches fiction. He
served as fiction editor for the Seattle Review from l978-98. In
1995 he received an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters from Southern Illinois
University, in 1994 an honorary Doctor of Arts degree from Northwestern, in
l999 an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the State University of New York
at Stony Brook, and in 2006 a Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Lewis and
Clark College. He sponsors the "Marie Clair Davis Award in Creative Writing,"
given to a secondary student at Evanston Township High School, and the Charles
Johnson Student Fiction Award, a national contest, at Southern Illinois
University. Please visit his author’s website at www.oxherdingtale.com.
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