Fenton Johnson

Fenton Johnson is the author of At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life, a New York Times Editors' Pick. He is author of the novels The Man Who Loved Birds; Scissors, Paper, Rock ; and Crossing the River . In nonfiction, Johnson has published Geography of the Heart: A Memoir and Keeping Faith: A Skeptic's Journey among Christian and Buddhist Monks . Geography received the American Library Association and Lambda Literary Awards for best LGBT Creative Nonfiction, while...See more

Fenton Johnson is the author of At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life, a New York Times Editors' Pick. He is author of the novels The Man Who Loved Birds; Scissors, Paper, Rock ; and Crossing the River . In nonfiction, Johnson has published Geography of the Heart: A Memoir and Keeping Faith: A Skeptic's Journey among Christian and Buddhist Monks . Geography received the American Library Association and Lambda Literary Awards for best LGBT Creative Nonfiction, while Keeping Faith received a Lambda Literary and Kentucky Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction. His collection Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays (2017) touches on topics as diverse as San Francisco in the AIDS epidemic to spirituality to a youthful encounter with Ike and Tina Turner. A regular contributor to Harper's Magazine, Johnson has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts in both fiction and nonfiction and has been featured on Terry Gross's Fresh Air. He has written the narrations and served as associate producer on several award-winning, internationally screened documentaries, among them Stranger with a Camera and La Ofrenda: Days of the Dead. He has taught in the graduate programs of Columbia, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, and San Francisco State University. He is currently emeritus professor at the University of Arizona and teaches writing workshops across the nation. He is currently writing the histories of his enslaved and slave-owning Kentucky ancestors as well as that of his great-grandfather, a Union soldier. See less