MACARTHUR FELLOW CHARLES JOHNSON TO SPEAK AT BLOOMFIELD COLLEGE
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March 19, 2002, Bloomfield, NJ -- Charles Johnson, a
MacArthur Fellow and recipient of the National Book Award for his novel Middle
Passage, will speak about “Ethics And Literature” at 6:30 p.m. on
Wednesday, April 10 in the Robert V. Van Fossan Theatre on the Bloomfield
College campus. The talk is free and open to the public.
The event is being sponsored by The Cyrus H. Holley Professorship in Applied Ethics and the programs in Philosophy and English/Writing in the Humanities Division at Bloomfield College. |
Recipient of the 1990 National Book Award for Middle Passage, Johnson is the first African-American male to win the prize since Ralph Ellison in 1953. He is the author of four novels, including Faith and the Good Thing, Oxherding Tale, and Dreamer, which reimagines the final two years in the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a collection of Johnson’s short stories, was published in 1986. Last year, Houghton Mifflin published Soulcatcher and Other Stories, his 12 historical fictions written for Africans in America, a companion book to the PBS series co-authored by Patricia Smith.
Among his many other works are: King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970, Black Men Speaking, and two books of drawings.
His work has appeared in numerous publications in America and abroad, and has been translated into seven languages. He has received the Lifetime Achievement in the Arts Award from the Corporate Council for the Arts as well as many other awards. In 1999, Indiana University published a “reader” of his work entitled, I Call Myself an Artist: Writings By and About Charles Johnson. A literary critic, screenwriter, philosopher, international lecturer and cartoonist with more than 1,000 drawings published, he is the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Endowed Professor of English at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Born in Evanston, Illinois, Johnson began his career as a cartoonist. Under the tutelage of cartoonist Lawrence Lariar, he saw his work published by the time he was 17 years old. His two collections of cartoons were acclaimed for their subtle but pointed satire of race relations, and their success led to “Charlie’s Pad,” a 1971 series on public television that Johnson created, co-produced and hosted.
As an undergraduate at Southern Illinois University, Johnson studied with novelist and literary theorist John Gardner, whose conception of “moral fiction” deeply impressed him. Johnson’s first novel, Faith and the Good Thing was published in 1974 when the author was studying for his Ph.D. in phenomenology and literary aesthetics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
The Robert V. Van Fossan Theatre is part of the Westminster Arts Center at Bloomfield College, and is located on the corner of Franklin and Fremont Streets. Bloomfield College is easily accessible from the Garden State Parkway, Exit 148 from the South or Exit 149 from the North.
