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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 in 2008 Remembering Martin Luther
King, Jr: 40 Years Later, His Life and Crusade in
Pictures (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."
He has published 52 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 286 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 336 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. In April, 2009 Linda
Furgerson Selzer published Charles Johnson in Context
(University of Massachusetts Press). 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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