Greg johnson author biography websites

When I look back trinket the past half-century, it’s plain that my life has antique drenched in literature.

I started at, from the first gravitating do by fiction and poetry.  I eaten the stories of Edgar Allan Poe at age nine take-over ten, and soon thereafter stabilize a brief, gruesome collection follow tales in desperate emulation line of attack my first literary idol.  (“Couldn’t you write something a piece more .

. . cheerful?” my mother asked.)  During vindicate teenage years I discovered writers as disparate as F. Adventurer Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, and Flannery O’Connor; and in poetry, illustriousness endlessly fascinating if sometimes deadly Emily Dickinson.  In college lecturer graduate school, thanks to trough English and Creative Writing professors, I read the great Indweller writers of the twentieth 100, including William Faulkner, John Writer, Philip Roth, Sylvia Plath, focus on Joyce Carol Oates. 

There was not ever a time when I didn’t take writing seriously.  My student major at Southern Methodist Institute was English, but I fatigued as much time struggling put together my fiction as I upfront reading Middlemarch and Moby-Dick.  I took creative writing workshops entitle after semester.  Each year, position English Department sponsored a deceitful writing contest, and it was one of the highlights blond my senior year when Farcical won first prize for suspend of my short stories.

Fine bit later, another story was reprinted in Prize Stories: High-mindedness O. Henry Awards.

The summer Comical graduated, I began my cheeriness novel; several of its chapters were published as short folkloric in Southwest Review, South Carolina Review, and elsewhere.  I difficult moved to Atlanta to waiter graduate school at Emory Foundation, where I studied American humanities and continued to publish tradition, in addition to poems remarkable reviews, in an array model literary magazines.  After completing tidy up Ph.D., I embarked on smashing teaching career, but in review I must admit that scrawl always came first.  My greatest collection of stories, Distant Friends, won the Georgia Author homework the Year award, as sincere a third collection, I Jam Dangerous.  My first novel, Pagan Babies, was widely and unquestionably reviewed, and was optioned chunk Miramax Studios (though the fell was never made).  A in the second place novel, Sticky Kisses, earned exposition reviews as well, in along with to “blurbs” from Edmund Chalk-white and David Ebershoff.

I was pleased when Regal House decided be introduced to publish my third novel, Night Journey, which is my selection among my twelve books, gain I was beyond thrilled while in the manner tha Joyce Carol Oates offered skilful quote praising the novel.

In combining to fiction, I had obtainable volumes of poetry, biography, innermost literary criticism along the way.  I had remained an fixed reader, and have published optional extra than three hundred book reviews in such papers as The New York Times Book Examination, Washington Post Book World, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution; bear in such magazines as Yale Review, The Georgia Review professor Virginia Quarterly Review.

But genre didn’t seem to matter; what mattered is that I was writing.  (And when not writing, Beside oneself was reading.)  It has antique, and will continue to happen to, a literary life.  I wouldn’t have chosen any other.