Z-Arts hosts poetry reading by Kimberly Johnson
By Joyce Hartless
Z-Arts will host a poetry reading by Kimberly Johnson Feb. 28 at 7 p.m. in the Canyon Community Center in Springdale. The event is free and open to the public.
Kimberly Johnson is an American poet, translator, literary critic, and Renaissance writer. Her poetry collections include “Leviathan with a Hook,” “A Metaphorical God,” and “Uncommon Prayer.” Born in Salt Lake City, she holds master’s degrees from Johns Hopkins University and the University of Iowa and a PhD in Renaissance literature from the University of California at Berkeley. Johnson is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Utah Arts Council. She teaches creative writing and Renaissance literature at Brigham Young University.
Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, The Iowa Review, 32 Poems, and The Yale Review. Her translations from Latin and Greek have been published in literary and academic journals. She has also published a number of scholarly articles on 17th Century literature.
“Johnson’s poems adopt a number of their forms from mystical or sacred texts — psalms, divinations, odes, hymns, spells — but her settings are as earthbound as her own scorched backyard garden or the driver’s seat of a white pickup careering down a highway during a thunderstorm,” Lisa Russ Spaar wrote in her review of “A Metaphorical God.”
The Canyon Community Center located at 126 Lion Blvd. in Springdale.
