Novelist Charles Johnson
The 2015 Lit Fest welcomes novelist Charles Johnson. The fest is March 25-27.
All readings and lectures are free and open to the public. The five visiting writers will be present throughout the festival, lecturing and reading from their work, and books by the authors will be available for purchase after each program, and at Little Professor Book Center. See the schedule for Ohio University Spring Literary Festival, also featuring essayists Dorothy Allison and Brian Doyle, and poets Marie Howe and Robert Pinsky.
Thursday, March 26, Baker Center Ballroom
- 11 a.m. Charles Johnson Lecture
CLOSING NIGHT! March 27, Baker Center Theater
- 8:30 p.m. Charles Johnson Reading
About Charles Johnson
Johnson is the author of four novels, Faith and the Good Thing (1974), Oxherding Tale (1982), Middle Passage (1990), and Dreamer (Scribner, l998); three collection of short stories, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1986) Soulcatcher and Other Stories (2001), and Dr. King’s Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories (2005); a work of aesthetics, Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970 (1988); and two collections of comic art, Black Humor (1970) and Half-Past Nation Time (1972).
Johnson, a Ph.D. in Philosophy, 1998 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). 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 10 best short story writers in America.
He served as fiction editor for the Seattle Review from 1978-98. 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 1999 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. A former director of the creative writing program at the University of Washington, he held an endowed chair, the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Professorship for Excellence in English, and currently teaches fiction.
About Spring Literary Festival
Since 1986, The Spring Literary Festival has featured some of the world’s finest, most distinguished writers of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. The three-day spring festival is held on the Ohio University campus in Athens, OH. It is sponsored by the Creative Writing program in the Department of English and is generously funded by the College of Arts & Sciences.
For more information, contact David Wanczyk, Spring Literary Festival Coordinator, at davidwanczyk@gmail.com.
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