Kent Johnson - Career

Career

He has been an English and Spanish instructor at Highland Community College in Freeport, Illinois, since 1992. He received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and his Ph.D. from Bowling Green State University. He is married and has two sons.

His poetry and translation work have been the subject of both considerable controversy and praise. Dozens of critical pieces have focused on his work, and an anthology of essays has recently been published on the Araki Yasusada “affair,” a much debated topic in the poetry world since the mid-1990s, and a work for which Johnson (though he has never asserted authorship) is frequently ascribed responsibility. Johnson has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and two PEN Translation Awards from PEN American Center, all of these in relation to his two-volume translation, with the poet Forrest Gander, of the Bolivian writer Jaime Saenz. In 2005, Johnson was named Illinois’s annual “Outstanding Faculty Member” by the Illinois Community College Trustees Association. Johnson is also the recipient of a Pushcart Book of the Month Award, an Illinois Arts Council Poetry Award, and a Times Literary Supplement “Books of the Year” highlight (2011), for his A Question Mark above the Sun: Documents on the Mystery of a Famous Poem “By” Frank O’Hara (Punch Press, 2010).

Kent Johnson is co-editor of Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry (Shambhala, 1991) and of Third Wave: the New Russian Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 1992). In 1980 and 1983, during the Sandinista Revolution, he worked in the Nicaraguan countryside for many months, teaching basic literacy and adult education. From this experience he translated A Nation of Poets (West End Press, 1985), the most representative translation in English from the famous working-class Talleres de Poesia of Nicaragua, carrying an interview he conducted with then-Minister of Culture Ernesto Cardenal. He has edited Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada (Roof Books, 1998), as well as Also, with My Throat, I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords: Araki Yasusada's Letters in English (Combo Books, 2005). With Forrest Gander, Johnson has translated Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz (California University Press, 2002), which was a PEN Award for Poetry in Translation selection. A second book of Saenz's work, The Night, was published by Princeton University Press in 2008, and also received a Translation Award from PEN. With Alexandra Papaditsas he is author of The Miseries of Poetry: Traductions from the Greek (Skanky Possum, 2003; rept. CCCP, UK, 2005), Dear Lacan (CCCP, 2005), Epigramititis: 118 Living American Poets (BlazeVox Books, 2006), and I Once Met (Longhouse Books, 2007). Translations of his own poetry have appeared in over a dozen countries, and three book collections of his work have been translated and published abroad, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Chile, and Argentina. Homage to the Last Avant-Garde, a collection of new and selected poems, appeared from Shearsman Books in 2009. DAY and Doggerel for the Masses, two conceptual texts, appeared in 2009 and 2011, respectively. A second, expanded edition of A Question Mark above the Sun (see above), will be published in Fall 2012.