Poet Marci Rae Johnson visits Eastern Mennonite University for a 6:30 p.m. reading on Saturday, Oct. 15, at Common Grounds coffeehouse.
This is the first Writers Read to be scheduled during Homecoming and Family Weekend, said Language and Literature Department chair Michael Medley, who anticipates a convivial evening of students, alumni, parents and other members of the campus community sharing a love of poetry together. Johnson will be introduced by Interim President Lee Snyder.
Johnson teaches writing at Wheaton College in Illinois, where she earned first a BA in literature and sociology and then an MA in theological studies. Her MFA in creative writing and poetry is from Spalding University.
Recently, Johnson published her second book of poetry, Basic Disaster Supply Kit. This work includes a poem called “Jesus Cleanses a Leper” which was featured on the Englewood Book Review website in January 2016.
This poem “contains some startling surprises,” Medley says, noting that “Jesus appears as a celebrity attending at a rock concert who stretches out his hand, adorned with an emerald ring, to make a metaphorical leper clean.”
A self-proclaimed “big grammar geek,” Medley says he also enjoys the poem “‘Showing Existence or Condition,’ in which she plays with grammatical terminology and word etymologies.” The poem begins “To be. Infinitive. / From the Latin infinitas as in / the mind of God, the universe / the space before / and after.”
Her work may be found in The Louisville Review, Minnetonka Review, Strange Horizons and 32 Poems, among others. She is the founder of The Poetry Factory, a reading series in St. Joseph, Michigan.
With over a decade of experience in editorial work at a small press called WordFarm, she also serves as poetry editor of The Cresset.
Johnson’s first collection of poems, The Eyes the Window, was published in 2013. It received strong reviews from critics such as Brad Fruhauff, who describes a “fascinating collection that makes you feel at once a witness to intimate moments and a stranger outside of true intimacy.” It won the 2011 Powder Horn Prize for first books.
A featured writer at the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College in 2014 and at the Indiana Faith and Writing Conference in 2015, Johnson will be a panelist at the upcoming Midwest Conference of Christianity and Literature.