Cheri Johnson — an acclaimed novelist, poet, playwright and educator — will be the final featured guest in this fall’s Living Writers Series at SUNY Oswego, appearing at 3 p.m. oWednesday, Nov. 19, in Marano Campus Center auditorium, room 132.
Her event, which will include a reading, Q&A and book signing, is free and open to both the campus and wider community.
Johnson is the author of "Annika Rose," winner of the 2022 Women’s Prose Prize from Red Hen Press. Her wide-ranging literary career includes work in poetry, fiction, plays, literary essays and books for young readers. She has received prestigious awards and fellowships from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the McKnight Foundation, the Bush Foundation, Yaddo, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and others.
“It’s only fitting that we end this series, which considers 'Home,' with this author and this book,” said Living Writers Series organizer Sari Fordham. Johnson’s appearance speaks directly to this fall’s Living Writers Series theme.
“No one in my family lives within 300 miles of the country I grew up in,” Johnson said. “When I go there, and especially when I'm on a back road after dark, traveling slowly along a narrow strip of gravel between two steep ditches and wild bog land, I get a ghostly feeling as if I never left. But this place doesn't haunt me as much as I haunt it; I'm the ghost in this picture. I rattle my chains in the house I grew up in in much of the fiction I write. It shows up over and over, never inhabited by my own family, but by a series of vagabonds who always feel me watching, the poor things.”
“Come hear Cheri talk about the chains she rattles in her fiction," said Fordham. “This event will be one you won't forget.”
Living Writers Series events are made possible by ARTSwego and the Student Arts Fee, with additional support from campus partners.
For more information on this event and the series, visit the SUNY Oswego events calendar.
-- Submitted by the Living Writers Series