About
Brian Johnson was born in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan. He grew up in the Midwest, in the South, and on both coasts.
He read a lot—most impressionably, as a seventh grader, Steppenwolf—and played tennis. Under the tutelage of his mother, he won the Minnesota state high school tennis championship (twice) and landed a tennis scholarship at the University of Iowa, where he played for two years and attended his first writing workshop, with the short story writer Janet Desaulniers. Having grown tired of Iowa City’s winters and bars, he transferred to UC-Berkeley, where he received his B.A. in English with Highest Honors. After a term studying Lawrence Sterne, Walter Pater, and Virginia Woolf at Cambridge University (UK), and a month-long tour of the continent, he returned to the United States, choosing Boston over Berkeley when his college girlfriend broke up with him.
He read a lot—most impressionably, as a seventh grader, Steppenwolf—and played tennis. Under the tutelage of his mother, he won the Minnesota state high school tennis championship (twice) and landed a tennis scholarship at the University of Iowa, where he played for two years and attended his first writing workshop, with the short story writer Janet Desaulniers. Having grown tired of Iowa City’s winters and bars, he transferred to UC-Berkeley, where he received his B.A. in English with Highest Honors. After a term studying Lawrence Sterne, Walter Pater, and Virginia Woolf at Cambridge University (UK), and a month-long tour of the continent, he returned to the United States, choosing Boston over Berkeley when his college girlfriend broke up with him.
Awards
When Brian received the Faculty Scholar Award. — at Southern Connecticut State University.
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For the next eight years, he wrote—first a novel, then poems—while supporting himself with a full range of low-paying jobs: movie usher, bookstore clerk, parks & rec tennis instructor, fast food delivery coordinator, deli counterperson, and waiter. Rich with experiences but still relatively unpublished, he returned to graduate school and received his M.F.A. in Poetry from Brown University, where he studied with C.D. Wright and John Yau and received the Arstark Memorial Award for Poetry and the Academy of American Poets Prize.
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Teaching
Professors Brian Curtis Johnson and Nicole Henderson presenting a new project for the SCSU First Year Experience Program. It's going to be good! Excited!
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Several years of part-time teaching followed, including positions at Providence College, Yale University, Saint Joseph University, and Albertus Magnus College. In 1999, he secured tenure-track work at Southern Connecticut State University, where he is Professor of English and has served as President of the Faculty Senate.
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Presentations
Presentation
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He teaches courses in composition, creative writing, the history of rhetoric, twentieth and twenty-first century literature, and poetic theory. Widely published in journals, he is the author of three collections: Self-Portrait; Torch Lake and Other Poems, a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s first book award; and Site Visits, a collaboration with a German painter.
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Looking forward to hearing from you, feel free to drop me an email and go like my social media pages
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address - Prof. Brain Johnson
SCSU 501 Crescent Street English Dept. New Haven CT 06511 |
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